Alfred the Great

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ALFRED THE GREAT

ALFRED THE GREAT.
Statue by Hamo Thornycroft, R.A.

illfreb

CONTAINING

Chapters on t)ts Htfe anD Ctmes

MR. FREDERIC HARRISON, THE LORD BISHOP OF BRISTOL

PROFESSOR CHARLES OMAN, SIR CLEMENTS MARKHAM

THE REV. PROFESSOR EARLE, SIR FREDERICK POLLOCK

AND THE REV. W. J. LOFTIE ; ALSO CONTAINING

AN INTRODUCTION BY SIR WALTER BESANT

AND A POEM BY THE POET LAUREATE

EDITED, WITH PREFACE, BY
ALFRED BOWKER

MAYOR OF WINCHESTER
1897-98

' This ivill I say that I have sought to live 'worthily the while I lived,

and after my life to leave to the men that come after me

a remembering of me in good ivorks.'

LONDON
ADAM & CHARLES BLACK

1899

TO

JKajestg tlje

BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION
THIS VOLUME

IS
DEDICATED

THE SPOTLESS KING

Some lights there be within the Heavenly Spheres
Yet unrevealed, the interspace so vast :
So through the distance of a thousand years
Alfred's full radiance shines on us at last.

II

Star of the spotless fame, from far-off skies
Teaching this truth, too long not understood,
That only they are worthy who are wise,
And none are truly great that are not good.

Ill

Of valour, virtue, letters, learning, law,
Pattern and prince, His name will now abide,
Long as of conscience Rulers live in awe,
And love of country is their only pride.

IV

But with His name four other names attune,
Which from oblivion guardian Song may save ;
Lone Athelney, victorious Ethandune,
Wantage his cradle, Winchester his grave.

ALFRED AUSTIN.

PREFACE

Now that we are fast approaching the one thou-
sandth anniversary of the death of our greatest
sovereign of the past " King Alfred," whom it
is the laudable desire of many of Her Majesty's
subjects and others to commemorate fittingly
this book, which bears the king's name, and is written
in honour of the king, and is intended to present
what is known of the king's achievements and his
claim on the gratitude and love of the English-
speaking race, would hardly seem to demand a
preface.

To some minds, however, this small book, if it
appeared without a word of preface, might seem
insufficiently comprehensive ; it may be well, there-
fore, to explain shortly the motive for its produc-
tion. The International Committee organising
this Commemoration have considered it very
advisable that a publication should be issued with
a view to diffusing, as widely as possible, public
knowledge of the king's life and work. This
being the sole object, it became essential that the

x King Alfred

book should not be costly, but within the reach of
all. Therefore it was also necessary to restrict its
scope ; numerous subjects and possible illustrations
of interest have been left for a full and complete
biography of the great king.

At the same time, it is hoped that the chapters
which follow will enable the general reader to
create in his own mind a figure, a mind, a history,
worthy of the king *and equal to the occasion.
The general introduction is, in substance, the
address delivered in the Guildhall of Winchester
by Sir Walter Besant at the first public meeting
held to lay the foundation stone of this Commemo-
ration. The names of those who have contri-
buted chapters are a guarantee that the reader is
in good hands ; the subjects of these chapters show
a fairly complete division of the various lines in
which Alfred achieved greatness.

Whilst taking this opportunity of placing on
record my very cordial thanks to the contributors
for their gifts, especially to Sir Walter Besant,
and to the Lord Bishop of Winchester for
kindly advice, I feel that my thanks alone would
indeed be a poor requite ; but our readers, of
whatever station, whether high or low, by assisting
to the best of their ability in the forthcoming
Commemoration, which is veritably that of one
thousand years of many of our institutions, of
our government, and our national existence, will be

Preface xi

expressing gratitude and thanks more acceptable
than words of mine can convey.

It may seem strange to some readers that by
chance no full account is given of Asser's anecdote
of the scene between the king and the herdswoman
in the Isle of Athelney, where he took refuge, but
as the story is known to all, its omission may
perhaps be pardoned ; it is certainly not due to
any lack of interest in the story, which seems so
strikingly to show that at times, maybe when the
king was resting or sitting by the fire mending
his bows and weapons, he would become absorbed
in the one thought foremost in his mind that of
the welfare of his country and people, then sorely
harassed and oppressed by the Danes, and so
neglected the homely duty that was present.

I have, further, to draw the reader's attention to
the circular at the end of the book, but it is not
necessary for me to point out the advisability, or
to detail the many praiseworthy reasons, for the
erection of memorials to illustrious dead, stimulat-
ing and encouraging as they are to succeeding
generations, engendering patriotic sentiments, and
recalling to us the history of the past by which
knowledge is weighed and gained, and that from
the lesson we learn almost unwittingly to shape
and guide our future steps.

In conclusion, I would express a hope that the
following chapters will be read far and wide with

xii King Alfred

as much pleasure and profit as they have been by
myself, and that through their agency, and out of
public subscription, we may soon see rising in the
heart of the capital of Wessex, worthy not of
England alone, but of the English-speaking race, a
memorial to one who may rightly be regarded as
one of the principal founders of the English nation
and its language, a pioneer of improvement, liberty,
learning and education, and who, though a thousand
years have sped, still forms a mighty beacon of all
the highest aims and the noblest aspirations that
may dominate the hearts of men.

A. B.

1st May 1899.

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION, by Sir Walter Besant, F.S.A. . . i

ALFRED AS KING, by Frederic Harrison, Hon. Fellow

of Wadham College, Oxford . . . -39

ALFRED AS A RELIGIOUS MAN AND AN EDUCATIONALIST,

by the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Bristol . 69

ALFRED AS A WARRIOR, by Charles Oman, M.A., F.S.A.,

Fellow of All Souls, Oxford . . . .115

ALFRED AS A GEOGRAPHER, by Sir Clements Markham,

K.C.B., President of the Royal Geographical Society 149

ALFRED AS A WRITER, by Rev. John Earle, Professor of

Anglo-Saxon, Oxford. . . . 169

ENGLISH LAW BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST, by Sir
Frederick Pollock, Bart., Corpus Professor of Juris-
prudence 207

ALFRED AND THE ARTS, by Rev. W. J. Loftie, F.S.A. . 241
INDEX . . - 259

BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF KING ALFRED.

INTRODUCTION

N writing an Introduction to the
chapters which follow, I shall not be
expected to contribute any new facts
to the life of the great king. As for
any new facts, the time has long gone by when any-
thing new could be discovered concerning the great
king of whom I have to speak. The tale of Alfred
is a twice-told tale : but it is a tale that should be
always fresh and new, because at every point it
concerns every successive generation of English-
speaking people. Happily it is not the whole life
of Alfred that we have to consider in this place : it
is the example of that life : the things that Alfred
invented and achieved during that short life for his
own generation ; things which have lasted to our
own day, and still bear fruit and golden sheaves.
I should like to proceed at once to those achieve-
ments, but it is absolutely necessary first that we
should understand some of the conditions of the
time : the troubles and the struggles : the over-
throw and ruin with which Alfred's reign began :

2 King Alfred

the apparent hopelessness of the situation changed
by the unexpected uprising of one man : and the
rapid development of this man as Captain, Con-
queror, Administrator, and Teacher. This done,
we shall be in a position to receive the King as an
example that should abide with the people still, and
should still continue to shape the lives and inspire
the minds of his race.

In order to prevent long explanations, and to
illustrate at the outset some of the conditions of
England when Alfred was born into the world,
I have caused a small map to be drawn. You
will see that the island is divided up into many
nations. There is first the Kingdom of Kent,
founded by the Jutes, who never extended them-
selves : then the Kingdom of Wessex or of the
West Saxons, who by this time had absorbed the
Kingdom of Essex or East Saxons, and of Sussex
or South Saxons. The modern counties of Norfolk
and Suffolk form the Kingdom of East Anglia
founded by Angles, a people closely allied to Jutes
and Saxons : the middle of England is Mercia, the
Kingdom of the March or boundary the Mercians
were also Angles. On the north is the Kingdom
of Northumbria, also founded by Angles. The
West of England is wholly occupied by Strath-
clyde, Wales, and Cornwall, all kingdoms of the
Britons or Welsh who remained still unconquered.
In Scotland the Highlands were occupied by the

Introduction

Picts, and a part of the west was peopled by the
Scots who crossed over from Ireland. The Angles
therefore occupied the middle, the north, and the
east ; they gave their own name to the whole
country Angle-land or England : the Saxons
occupied the south, with the exception of Kent :
the Welsh still held nearly the whole of the west :
but their territories were separated and cut into
three parts. If we look backwards and forwards
in history during these centuries we shall find the
map of our island constantly changing. But still
we may take this map fairly to represent the
country as it was in the time of Alfred eight
distinct nations in it : three of them composed of
Angles, who were not on that account allies : one
containing Jutes : one of Saxons : three of Welsh.
These so-called nations shifted their borders con-
tinually : they fought their neighbours : they split
up and fought each other : there was no coherence
or stability among them : some of them adopted
Christianity and then relapsed : some of them re-
mained pagans.

These were the tribes or nations in the land.

Let us next consider what manner of men it
was over whom Alfred was called upon to rule.
In order to get at this knowledge we must inquire
of their religion, their laws, and their customs. As
for their religion, before they became Christians, it
was a fierce and cruel religion, although it was full

4 King Alfred

of imagination, as was to be expected of a people in
whose minds the noblest poetry was slumbering.
There were Gods who created and invented : Gods
who gave life and inspired love : Gods who sent the
thunder and the storm : Gods who brought the
spring and the sunshine, the fruit, and the harvest.
There were evil Gods the Gods of Death, who
killed men : the Gods of Disease, who tortured
men : the Gods of the Sea and the River, who
drowned men : the Gods of Battle, who struck men
with cowardice, and weighed down their hands so
that they could not strike. There were humbler
deities spirits of the stream, the woods, and the
hills for the most part hostile to men and malig-
nant, because in certain stages of civilisation the
unknown forces of Nature present themselves
as personal deities who are always hostile to man
according to the Greek legend, for instance, he
who met the great God Pan face to face fell down
dead. They believed in raising spirits and in
spectres, much as some of us do now : they believed
in witches and in witchcraft : in magic and in charms :
in love philtres : in divination : in lucky days. In a
word, the Anglo-Saxon was full of the superstitions
which belonged to his age.

There was, however I venture to read between
the lines one saving clause. The Anglo-Saxon
was not only afraid of the unknown, which caused
him to invent malignant deities, but in his mind

Introduction 5

the God of Creation was stronger than the God
of Destruction. There is hope for a people while
that belief survives. Long after he became a
Christian the Saxon continued to retain his old
beliefs under other names : he saw and conversed
in imagination with the old deities whom he had
forsaken : they spoke to him in the thunder : he
saw their forms in the flying cloud, in the
splendour of the sunset : he heard their whispers
in the woods : they came to him in dreams.
Religion, to the Anglo-Saxon, was a thing more
real, more present, than it has ever been to any
people except the Russian and the Jew. This is
perhaps the most important point to be observed
in the character of Alfred's people. They were
profoundly influenced by their religion. In the
eighth century, when Christianity was spread over
the south and the middle of the country, all classes
began to long after the religious life as they under-
stood it. Kings and Queens there were ten Kings
and eleven Queens Princes and Princesses, nobles
and freemen all who could be received, crowded
into the monasteries : they were eager for the
life of meditation and of prayer : they made the
cloisters rich : they filled the monastic houses with
gold and silver plate and rich treasure. When
the Danish invasion began, the Danes very soon
found out that it was the monastery, and not the
town, which they should sack : and at the same

6 King Alfred

time the people found out that the full monastery
meant the shrunken army. It has been said that
the Anglo-Saxon never changes. In this respect
at least he has never changed. Through all the
changes and chances of a thousand years, wherever
he has penetrated, wherever he has settled, he has
carried with him the same earnestness and the same
reality of religion.

We must also note, next to the earnestness of
his religious belief, the freedom of his institutions.
The liberties of our race, which have become to
us like the very air we breathe, so that we are not
even conscious of them, were not wrested by the
people from reluctant kings. These liberties had
always been with them from the prehistoric times
when the family was the unit, and when custom
was the only kind of law. Among their primitive
customs were the first rude forms of their free
institutions. From the Forests of North Germany,
from the mouth of the Elbe, not from any king,
came the right of free meeting : the right of free
speech : the right of free thought : the right of
free work.

Next, as a people the Saxons were also fond of
music, singing, poetry : the quicker witted Norman
despised the Saxon as slow of understanding.
Perhaps : but the Saxon proved himself in the
long-run far more capable of enthusiasm, of
loyalty, of patriotism, of sacrifice, of all those

Introduction 7

actions and emotions which spring from the
imagination and produce forces united and irre-
sistible. Remember that the whole of our litera-
ture is Anglo-Saxon ; none of it is Norman. There
is not one great Norman poet. No Norman
literature was produced on this our Anglo-Saxon
soil.

The next characteristic of this people is less
picturesque. They were obstinate. Now obstinacy,
if we think of it, is one of the most useful and
valuable qualities that can be planted in the breast
of man. It has many names : it is called by its
friends firmness : under any name it is the tenacious
man who wins in the long-run.

They were essentially an outdoor people : they
loved all manner of outdoor sports : all classes
were hunters, hawkers, fishers, trappers : the country
was full of creatures to hunt : there were in the
forests wolves, bears, wild bulls, and stags : they
loved the free air of the open hillside : and they
hated towns. It was many years after their settle-
ment in this country before they ceased to feel the
old terror of the magic which, they thought, could
be practised within the walls of a city.

As regards the Anglo-Saxon women, it is pleasant
to learn that the very same virtues which are now
conspicuous in our own women of the present day
were conspicuous in them. She was, as Thomas
Wright says, " An attentive housewife : a tender

8 King Alfred

companion : the comforter and consoler of her
husband and her family : the virtuous and noble
matron." In all ranks, from the queen to the
farmer's wife, we find the lady of the household
attending to her household duties. They were
more learned than the men : they could recite and
sing the poetry of their native bards : they were
skilful in playing the harp : and in embroidery and
needlework of all kinds the work of the Anglo-
Saxon ladies was in demand all over Western
Europe.

The Anglo-Saxon, therefore, had many virtues.
He had also, we must confess, his faults, which
were conspicuous as well as numerous. He was
slothful of mind : he was always ready to sink
back to the ancient seclusion of the village and
the forest : he was conservative, and thought the
old ways would last for ever : he was a great
drinker in drinking, except among the Danes,
he had no equal : he would drink for days
together almost without stopping : even the priests
did not escape the universal vice : they were
admonished by the bishops not to say mass unless
they were sober : his hospitality consisted chiefly
in making the guests drunk. The Saxons, again,
have been charged with cruelty certainly very
terrible things were done, but we cannot expect
a people to be before their age : it was a cruel
age. Frenchman, Norman, Dane, Saxon : all

Introduction

alike were cruel in their punishments : but these
things belong to the time. Let us acquit the
people of Wessex of more than their share of the
average cruelty. The stories told of the Danes,
for example, are almost incredible, whether for
the cruelty of the torture, or for the endurance of
the victim.

When we say that the Anglo-Saxon was a free
man, and governed by free laws, we must not
imagine him to be a Republican of the nineteenth
century. Nor must we conclude that the Anglo-
Saxon was a democrat, as we understand demo-
cracy. He had his king over him, to begin with :
and the king was not elected by the people from
among themselves, as the President of a Republic ;
he succeeded because he belonged to the Royal blood.
He was even allowed, long after they were
Christians, to be descended from the Gods : the
people consented to his succession, but they did
not elect him. As king he had very large powers,
and these were undefined : men had not yet begun
to question the Royal Prerogative : above all, he was
their captain : he led the army : he fought with the
army.

In a word, the Anglo-Saxon of the ninth century
was in essentials very much like his descendant
of the present day. He was religious : he was a
lover of order: he was a good fighting man: he was
fond of outdoor sports and occupations : he was

I o King Alfred

tenacious of his freedom : he was imaginative,
poetical, and dreamy : he was fond of music : he
was still full of the old traditions and superstitions
which ruled his life, long after he had become
a Christian. This is a general summary of his
character. In one virtue he was as yet wanting.
We must not expect in him what we call the
national and patriotic sentiment. The man of
Wessex was the enemy of the man of Mercia : the
north stood aloof from the south : there was no
England or Britain : there was only a large island
divided among eight nations, or ten nations, or
five nations, according to the year of the Lord :
some of them spoke the same tongue : all the
Angles, Jutes, and Saxons had similar institutions :
nevertheless they were enemies. You remember,
two hundred years later on, how London accepted
the rule, first, of Cnut the Dane : and, next, of
William the Norman. Both of them were what
we should call foreigners. There was no such
feeling then. To the Londoner it mattered little
whether his king was Mercian, Northumbrian,
Saxon, Jute, Dane, or Norman. London received
kings from all these people. There was not yet
any feeling existing for the country as a whole.
It was part of the work of Alfred, unseen and un-
suspected, to make it possible to weld the different
nations into one : to create little by little the love
of country in place of the old loyalty to the tribe.

Introduction 1 1

Let us concede that Alfred fought, not for
England, but for Wessex. In doing so, it is true,
he fought for all England, but perhaps without
his knowledge. In the same way David fought
first for his own little country for Judea and
made it possible for his successor to create one
great country, of which Judea was the centre.

I have lingered a long time over the character
of the people whom Alfred was called upon to rule.
Without this knowledge it is impossible to under-
stand what the king did and why he did it, and
in what respects his work is so truly remarkable
and wonderful. Let us now pass on to the history
itself, and first, naturally, to the invasions of the
Danes.

It was in the year 832 seventeen years before
the birth of Alfred that the Danes first made
their appearance on these shores. Their incur-
sions began and continued exactly in the same
way as those of the Saxons themselves 400 years
before. They came over in their ships : they
found the north seas without defence : they found
no fleets guarding the island from the pirates, as of
old : the people, ready to believe that things would
go on for ever unaltered, had actually abandoned
their ships ; had lost the art of ship- building ;
and were no longer accustomed to the sea. The
Danish fleet swooped down upon the coast : harried
the country : murdered the people : sacked the

1 2 King Alfred

monasteries and the churches, and went away again.
They found the coast, like the seas, defenceless :
the monastic houses had drained the country of
the fighting nobles : the warlike spirit of the
people was wasting itself in petty tribal wars. The
Danes, until the old spirit returned, were far
more than a match for the Saxons. They appeared
suddenly, without warning, now on the coast of
Kent : now on that of Dorsetshire : now at the
mouth of the Parret, in Somerset : now up the
Thames : now at Southampton : they came in
fleets of a hundred and fifty ships, carrying each
sixty or seventy warriors : an army greater than
anything that could be hastily got together against
them : by the time that an army was collected the
Danes had gone, leaving ruined churches : villages
destroyed by fire : monasteries pillaged of their
treasures : and murdered monks lying beside the
scattered relics, which could not protect them.
The Danes, their foray over, had gone off, bearing
their treasures with them, to their own country.
Next year they landed again : but on another part
of the island.

This yearly invasion of the Danes lasted for
twenty years. They always made straight for the
nearest monasteries, which they sacked : there
were not many towns in Saxon England ; but there
were some Canterbury, London, Southampton,
York they attacked these, seized, plundered, and

Introduction 1 3

left them in ruins. For twenty years they came
every year : sometimes we hear of a victory over
them : but still they came again : there was never
a victory so decisive as to keep them from return-
ing in ever-increasing numbers. Then they began
to stay in the country : they left off going home
in the autumn : they established themselves in
winter quarters, first on Sheppey Island, then on
the Isle of Thanet : then in Norfolk. Then they
went farther afield. In a word, they overran
and conquered East Anglia : then the Kingdom of
Northumbria : then that of Mercia : then the
united Kingdoms of Wessex and Kent. It was
at this crisis, when all the power of the Danes
was brought to bear against Wessex and Kent,
Alfred succeeded to the throne. His father and
his four brothers, kings one after the other, had
spent their lives in vainly beating back hordes
of the Danes, who returned year after year. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes the best of occa-
sional victories, but the fact remains that every
year the invaders became stronger and the
defenders became weaker. The King of Mercia
at last gave up the struggle and went to Rome,
to adopt the religious life, leaving his wife behind.
Alfred might have done the same thing, and it
would not have been imputed unto him for
cowardice, but for godliness.

Happily for England he did not. The Danes

14 King Alfred

had seized Chippenham, in Wiltshire, and made
that place their stronghold and headquarters.
From Chippenham they sent out their light
troops, moving rapidly here and there, devastating
and murdering. For nine long years, growing
every year weaker, Alfred fought them : in one
year he fought nine battles. At the end of that
time he found himself deserted, save for a few
faithful followers : his country prostrate : every-
thing in the hands of the enemy : his cause lost,
and apparently no loop-hole or glimmer of hope
left of recovery. No darker or more gloomy time
ever fell upon this country. Everywhere the
churches and the monasteries were pillaged and
destroyed. All those bishops, priests, monks, and
nuns who could get away had fled, carrying with
them such of their treasures as they could convey.
The towns were in ruins : the farms were de-
serted : the people had lost hope and heart : they
bowed their heads and entered into slavery : their
religion was destroyed with the flight or the murder
of their priests. Their arts, their learning, their
civilisation, all that they had once possessed,
were destroyed in those nine years' warfare :
destroyed and gone it seemed for ever. And
the king, with his wife and her sister, and his
children, and the few who still remained with him,
had taken refuge on a little hill rising out of a broad
marsh, whither the enemy could not follow him.

Introduction 1 5

In the after years Alfred was fond of talking
over this time of desolation : he would recall the
visions that came to him, and not only to him but
to his wife as well : they both saw visions of con-
solation and of promise. Saint Cuthbert himself
stood beside his bed and comforted him with pro-
mise of victory and honour. We can very well
believe the vision. To Alfred : to his wife : the
aid of the Saints was a thing to be invoked and to
be looked for. Did they not pray daily for the
help of the Saints? And who should aid the
Saxons in their trouble but their greatest Saint
Cuthbert himself? In the sleep or the waking of
night, what more natural than that Alfred should
imagine that he saw and spoke with the Saint him-
self? To those who drive or walk across the
dreary level of Sedgemoor, now drained by its deep
dykes, and dotted with its village churches, there
rises on the right hand the low hill of Athelney.
One can realise, looking upon this hill across the
fiat land, which was once covered with bogs and
quagmires, and reeds bending before the wind, how
complete was the defeat of the king : how com-
plete the victory of the Danes ; which should drive
Alfred to. seek such a refuge. The Danish Con-
quest, like the Norman Conquest two hundred
years later, seemed an achievement accomplished.
No further opposition : no one asked what had
become of Alfred he had run away to Rome :

1 6 King Alfred

he had gone into a monastery, perhaps : every-
where the Danes all over the country reported
submission and the acceptance of their rule. And
the old gods had come back again, Woden, and
Thor, and Friga, and the rest : and again the
fires flamed upon the high places, and the children
were passed through them, and all the Christian
saints had fled.

Alfred remained inactive during the whole long
winter. It was the rule of the old Kriegs Spiel,
the war game of that time, that the armies
should not go forth to fight in winter. The
men would have refused to go out in the cold
season. In fact, they could not. The country
was covered with uncleared forests : the roads
in winter were deep tracks of mud : it was
impossible for the men to sleep on the cold, wet
ground. The delay suited Alfred : he wanted time
to organise a rising in force : he sent messengers
to the Somersetshire people, among whom, in
winter quarters, were lying few or none of the
Danish conquerors : he bade them make ready for
the spring : he ordered those of the thanes who
were still left to come to him at Athelney : and
in May, when the spring arrived, Alfred appeared
once more as one risen from the dead : once
more he raised the Wessex standard of the Golden
Dragon : once more the people, taking renewed
courage, flocked together : as he marched along

Introduction 1 7

they joined him, the fugitives from the woods and
those who had been made slaves in their own farms,
and swelled his force.

What follows is like a dream. Or it is like
the uprising of the French under Joan of Arc.
There had been nine years of continuous defeat.
The people had lost heart : they had apparently
given in. Yet, on the reappearance of their king,
they sprang to arms once more : they followed
him with one consent, and on the first encounter
with the Danes they inflicted upon them a defeat
so crushing that they never rallied again. In one
battle, on one field, the country was recovered.
In a single fortnight after this battle the Danes
were turned out of Wessex. Alfred had recovered
the whole of his own country, and acquired in
addition a large part of Mercia.

It is significant to read that the Danish chief-
tain became a Christian, and was baptized. Do
you suppose that he weighed the arguments and
listened to the history and the doctrines of the new
religion ? Not at all. He perceived this logical
pagan that King Alfred's Gods had shown their
superiority over his own in a manner so unex-
pected, so amazing, and so decisive, that he
hesitated no longer. He acknowledged that
superiority ; he was baptized, and he never after-
wards relapsed.

Alfred had got back his kingdom. It remained

1 8 King A If red

for him to recover it in a fuller and a larger sense :
to restore its former prosperity and its ancient
strength.

He began by recognising the separate rights of
the Mercians. He would not call himself King of
Mercia. He placed his son-in-law Ethelred as
Earl of Mercia, and because London was at that
time considered a Mercian city, Ethelred took up
his residence there as soon as the Danes had
gone out. The condition of London was as deso-
late and as ruinous as that of the whole country.
The walls were falling down : there was no trade :
there were no ships in the river : no merchandise
on the wharves : there were no people in the
streets, save the Danish soldiers and the slaves
who worked for them. Alfred restored the
walls : rebuilt the gates : brought back trade and
merchants : repaired the Bridge, and made London
once more the most important city of his king-
dom : its strongest defence : its most valuable
possession. This was, in fact, the third founda-
tion of London. If Alfred had failed to under-
stand the importance of London that great
port, happily placed, not on the coast open to
attack, but a long way up a tidal river, in the very
heart of the country a place easy of access from
every part of the kingdom a port convenient for
every kind of trade, whether from the Baltic or
the Mediterranean the whole of the commercial

Introduction 1 9

history of England would have been changed, the
island might have remained what it had -been for
centuries before the Roman Conquest, a place
which exported iron, tin, skins, wool, and slaves,
and imported for the most part weapons to kill
each other with.

Alfred gave us London. The lesson of ten
years' fighting taught Alfred what the Saxons
had never before understood, the value of walled
cities in the case of invasion. He saw he was
the first to perceive how superior numbers may
be rendered of no avail when they fling themselves
against strong walls. The next Danish invaders
found themselves stopped on their way up the
Thames by a city fortified by a strong wall which
the enemy could neither knock down nor climb
over : and manned by citizens made doubly coura-
geous by the safety and the strength of their
ramparts. Six separate sieges were endured by
London during the second invasion of the Danes :
six separate times the enemy had to raise the siege
and to go elsewhere, leaving London unconquered.
Other walled towns were added Winchester,
York, Exeter, and Canterbury but the first was
London, whose fallen Roman wall, of which only
the hard core of cement remained, Alfred rebuilt
and faced again with stone.

Alfred, I repeat, gave us London. This was a
great service which he rendered to the safety of

20 King Alfred

the country. But there was still a greater service.
The Saxon had quite forgotten the seamanship in
which he had formerly known no master and no
equal. Alfred saw that for the sake of safety
there must be a first line of defence before the
coast could be reached. England could only
be invaded in ships, and by those who had the
command of the seas. Therefore, he created a
navy : he built ships longer, heavier, swifter than
those of the Danes, and he sent these ships out to
meet the Danes on what they supposed to be their
own element. They went out : they met the
Danes : they defeated them : and before long the
Saxons had afloat a fleet of a hundred ships to hold
the mastery of the Channel. The history of the
English navy is chequered : there have been
periods when its pretensions were low and its
achievements humble : but since the days of Alfred
the conviction has never been lost that the safety
of England lies in her command of the sea. Fort-
resses and walled cities are useful : it is a very
great achievement to have given them to the
country : London alone, restored by Alfred, was
the nation's stronghold, the nation's treasure
house, a city full of wealth, filled with valiant
citizens, unconquered and defiant : that was a very
great gift to the country : but it was a greater
achievement still to have given to the country a
fleet which was ready to meet the enemy before

Introduction 2 1

they had time to land, and to give them most
excellent reasons why they should not land : to
make the people understand that above all things,
and before all, it was necessary for all time to keep
the mastery of the seas.

Remember, therefore, that Alfred, thus, gave us
the command of the seas.

As Rudyard Kipling, our patriot poet, says :

We have fed our seas for a thousand years,

And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves

But marks our English dead.

"Never a wave of all her waves" and it was
Alfred who first sent out the English blood to
redden those waves in defence of hearth and home.
Now, there can be no doubt that if he had
advanced upon the great defeat of the Danes he
might have recovered the whole of the country
and become not only its overlord, as his grand-
father Egbert had been before him, but its king.
No doubt he was tempted : to a successful com-
mander more successes always lie before him
waiting to be snatched. This dream of conquest
he renounced. He sat down with what he had
the old kingdom of his forefathers, strengthened
by his new fleet : by the stronghold of London : and
by the restored courage and self-respect of his
people. The dream of conquest was a dream of

22 King Alfred

personal ambition : he put it aside. It was part of
that renunciation of self which belongs to the
whole of his career. The historian Green has
pointed out that Alfred " is the only instance in
the history of Christendom of a ruler who put
aside every personal aim or ambition in order to
devote himself wholly to the welfare of those
whom he ruled."

We have considered Alfred as a captain, a con-
queror, and the founder of our navy. We will
now consider him in the capacity of king, ad-
ministrator, and law-giver.

I do not claim for Alfred that he was the creator
of the English law. His glory consists mainly in
his adaptation of the old order to the new : he
took all that was left of the shattered past and
moulded it anew, with additions to suit the new
situation, and for the most part on the same lines.
You will ask, perhaps, how much of the honour
due to Alfred's achievements should be given to
his ministers and how much to himself? Assign
to his officers all the credit possible, all that belongs
to the faithful discharge of duty : still the initia-
tive, the design of the whole of the past, is abso-
lutely due to Alfred himself. He must not be
considered as a modern king the modern king
reigns while the people rule : he was the king who
ruled : his will ruled the land : he had his Parlia-
ment : his Meeting of the Wise : but his will ruled

Introduction 23

them : he appointed his earls or aldermen : his will
ruled them : he had his bishops : his will ruled
them. From the time when he began to address
himself to the organisation of a strong nation
that is to say, from the time when the Dane was bap-
tized, his will ruled supreme. No law existed then
to limit the king's prerogative. The king was im-
perator, commander of the army, and every man
in the country was his soldier.

Among the monuments of his reign there stands
out pre-eminent his code of laws. He did not, I
say, originate or invent his code. He simply took
the old code and rewrote it, with additions and
alterations to suit the altered conditions of the
time. He understood, in fact, the great truth,
which law-makers hardly ever grasp, that successful
institutions must be the outcome of national char-
acter. Now, the laws and customs of these nations
Saxons, Angles, and Jutes were similar, but
there were differences. They had grown with the
people, and were the outcome of the national
character. Alfred took over as the foundation of
his work for Wessex the code compiled for the
West Saxons by his ancestor, King Ina : for
Mercia, that compiled by Offa, King of Mercia :
for the Jutes, that compiled by Ethelbert, King of
Kent. In his work two main principles guided the
law-giver : first, that justice should be provided for
every one, high and low, rich and poor : next, that

24 King Alfred

the Christian religion should be recognised as con-
taining the Law of God : which must be the basis
of all laws. Both these principles were especially
necessary to be observed at this time. The de-
vastation of the long wars had caused justice to be
neglected : and the destruction of the churches,
and the murder or flight of the clergy, had caused
the people to relapse into their old superstitions.

King Alfred then boldly began his code by
reciting the Laws of God. His opening words
were : " Thus saith the Lord, ' I am the Lord thy
God.' ' That is his keynote. The laws of a
people must conform with the Laws of God. If
they are contrary to the spirit of these laws they
cannot be righteous laws. In order that every one
might himself compare his laws with the Laws of
God, he prefaced his laws first by the Ten Com-
mandments ; after this he quoted at length certain
chapters of the Mosaic Law. These chapters he
followed by the short epistle in the Acts of the
Apostles concerning what should be expected and
demanded of Christians. Finally, Alfred adds the
precept from St. Matthew, " Whatsoever ye would
that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."

Some writers have assumed that Alfred required
of his subjects by this preamble that they should
be governed in all the details of life by the Mosaic
Law. This view I cannot accept. Alfred set forth,
I think, these laws in order that his own might

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

THE SEASONS JANUARY TO MARCH

(Cottonian Library')

Introduction 25

be compared with them where comparison was
possible, and in order to challenge comparison
and to give the greater weight to his own laws by
showing that they were based in spirit and, mutatis
mutandis^ on the Levitical Law and on the Law of
the Gospel.

Moreover, in order to connect the whole system
of justice with religion, in order to teach the
people in the most efficacious manner possible
that the Church desires justice above all things,
he added to the sentence of the judge the penance
of the Church. This subjection of the law to the
Church would seem intolerable to us. At that
time it was necessary to make a rude, ignorant,
and violent people understand that religion must
be more than a creed : that it must have a practical
and restraining side ; a man who was made to under-
stand that an offence against the law was an offence
against the Church which would be punished by
the latter as well as by the secular judge, was made
for the first time to feel the reality of the Church.

This firm determination to link the Divine Law
and the Human Law : this firm reliance on the
Divine Law as the foundation of all law : is to
me the most characteristic point in the whole of
Alfred's work. The view the intention the
purpose of King Alfred are summed up, without
intention, by the poet whom I have already quoted.
The following words of Rudyard Kipling might

26 King Alfred

be the very words of Alfred : they breathe his
very spirit they might be, I say, the very words
spoken by Alfred :

Keep ye the law : be swift in all obedience
Clear the land of evil : drive the road and bridge the ford.
Make ye sure to each his own
That he reap where he hath sown :
By the Peace among our Peoples let men know we serve
the Lord !

Alfred endeavoured to rebuild the monasteries.
He then made the discovery that the old passion
for the monastic life was gone : he could get no
one to go into them. Forty years of a life and
death struggle had killed the desire for the cloister :
the people had learned to love action better than
seclusion their ideal was now the soldier, not the
monk. A great gain for the people, which never
afterwards returned to its ancient love of the Rule
and the Hood.

His chief design in rebuilding the monasteries
was to restore the schools. The country had
fallen so low in learning that there was hardly a
single priest who could translate the Church
Service into Saxon, or could understand the words
he sang. Alfred sent abroad for scholars : he
made his Religious House not only a place for
the retreat of pious men and women, but also the
home the only possible home of learning, and

Introduction 27

the seat of schools. It is long since we have
regarded a monastery as a seat of learning, or the
proper place for a school. Go back to Alfred's
time and consider what a monastery meant in a
land still full of violence : in which morals had
been lost: justice trampled down: learning destroyed :
no schools or teachers left : the monastery stood as
an example and a reminder of self-restraint : peace :
and order : a life of industry and such works as the
most ignorant must acknowledge to be good : where
the poor and the sick were received and cared for :
the young were taught : and the old sheltered. It
was the Life which the monastery Rule professed ;
the aim rather than any lower standards accepted
by the monks : which made a monastery in that age
like a beacon steadily and brightly burning, so that
the people had always before their eyes a reminder
of the self-governed life. Most of us would be
very unwilling to see the monastery again become
a necessity of the national life : yet we must admit
that in the ninth century Alfred had no more
powerful weapon for the maintenance of a religious
standard than the monastery.

In the cause of education, indeed, Alfred was
before his age, and even before our age. He
desired universal education. At his Court he pro-
vided instructors for his children and the children
of the nobles. They learned to read and write,
they studied their own language and its poetry :

28 King Alfred

they learned Latin : and they learned what were
called the " liberal sciences," among them the art
of music. But he thought also of the poorer
class. " My desire," he says, " is that all the
freeborn youths of my people may persevere in
learning until they can perfectly read the English
Scriptures." Unhappily he was unable to carry
out this wish. Only in our own days has been at
last attempted the dream of the Saxon King the
extension of education to the whole people.

One more aspect of Alfred's foresight. He
endeavoured to remove the separation of his island
from the rest of the world : he connected his
people with the civilisation of Western Europe by
encouraging scholars and men of learning, workers
in gold, and craftsmen of all kinds, to come over :
he created commercial relations with foreign
countries : a merchant who made three voyages
to the Mediterranean he ennobled : he sent an
embassy every year to Rome : he sent an embassy
as far as India : he brought to bear upon
the somewhat sluggish minds of his people the
imagination and the curiosity which would here-
after engender a spirit of enterprise to which no
other nation can offer a parallel.

It was partly with this view that he strongly
enforced the connection with Rome. One bond
of union the nations of the West should have a
common Faith : and that defined and interpreted

Introduction 29

for them by the same authority. Had it not been
for that central authority the nations would have
been divided, rather than drawn towards each other,
by a Christianity split up into at least as many
sects as there were languages. Imagine the evil, in
an ignorant time, of fifty nations, each swearing by
its own creed, and every creed different. From
this danger Alfred kept his country free.

The last, not the least, of his achievements is
that to Alfred we owe the foundations of our
literature : the most noble literature that the world
has ever seen. He collected and preserved the
poetry based on the traditions and legends brought
from the German Forests. He himself delighted to
hear and to repeat these legends and traditions :
the deeds of the mighty warriors who fought with
monsters, dragons, wild boars, and huge serpents.
He made his children learn their songs : he had
them sung in his Court. The tradition goes that
he could himself sing them to the music of his
own harp. This wild and spontaneous poetry
which Alfred preserved is the beginning of our
own noble choir of poets. In other words, the
foundation of that stately Palace of Literature,
built up by our poets and writers for the admira-
tion and instruction and consolation of mankind,
was laid by Alfred. Well, but he did more than
collect the poetry, he began the prose. Before
Alfred there was no Anglo-Saxon prose.

30 King Alfred

I have already quoted Green's remark that in
everything that Alfred designed or accomplished
he put aside every personal aim or ambition in
order to devote himself wholly to the welfare of
those over whom he ruled. In his capacity as
author this remark is specially illustrated. You all
know that it is the leading characteristic or the
infirmity of the poet, author, writer, to consider
himself as part of his message. Alfred put himself
aside : he presented his works in translations :
they were, indeed, translations : but embellished,
altered, enriched by his own work thus modestly
presented. There is one book, now quite neglected,
which for a thousand years profoundly moved the
world of Western Europe. It is a book, written
in prison by a noble Roman named Boethius, a
philosopher, soldier, poet, and mathematician. It
is entitled the Consolation of Philosophy. Fortu-
nately the author, who wrote it from a prison, had
time to finish it before they executed him. This
book Alfred translated or imitated. For he filled
his translations with his own thoughts and his own
judgments. He gives his own theories of govern-
ment : of the duties of a king : of maintaining the
population, and especially the proper proportion of
the different classes required to keep the nation in
a state of efficiency. Every man in the country is
a weapon which may be and should be used for
the advancement of the general welfare. It is the

Introduction 3 1

king's duty to select the best instruments, and to
use them to the best advantage. We even find
brief notes of his own thoughts. " This," says
the king, among these notes, " I can now truly
say, that so long as I have lived I have striven to
live worthily, and after my death to leave my
memory to my descendants in good works."

It is not the part of this Introduction to dwell
upon the whole of Alfred's literary work. It is
enough if we recognise that he introduced educa-
tion and restored learning. In the course of time,
innumerable books were attributed to him : it is said
that he translated the Psalms. A book of proverbs
and sayings is attributed to him each one begins
with the words "Thus said Alfred." The Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle and contemporary record of events
is said to have been commenced by him. And
since it is certain from the life of the king by one
of his own Court that he was regarded by all classes
of his people with the utmost reverence and re-
spect, I think it is extremely likely that some of
his people listened and took down in writing the
sayings of the king, so that the book of Alfred's
sayings may be as authentic as the sayings of Dr.
Johnson, recorded by his admirer Boswell.

There is next to be observed the permanence

of Alfred's institutions. They do not perish, but

remain. His Witenagemot Meeting of the Wise

is our Parliament it has developed into our

3 a King Alfred

many Parliaments. His order of King, Thane,
and Freeman is our order of King, Lords, and
Commons. His theory of education was carried
out in some of the towns, and in all the monas-
teries and cathedrals : there are schools still existing
which owe their origin to a period before the
Norman Conquest. His foundation of all law
upon the Laws of God remains our own : his
liberties are our liberties : his navy is the ancestor
of our navy : the literature which he planted has
grown into a goodly tree the Monarch of the
Forest : the foreign trade that he began is the
forerunner of our foreign trade : it would seem
as if there was hardly any point in which we have
reason to be grateful or proud which was not
foreseen by this wise king.

To look for the secret of his wisdom is like
looking for the secret of making a great poem or
writing a great play : it may be arrived at and
described, but it is not therefore the easier of
imitation. Alfred's secret is quite simple. His
work was permanent because it was established on
the national character. It was in order to make
this point clear that I dwelt at length on the
character of the people over whom Alfred ruled.
He knew their character, and by instinct, which we
call genius, he gave his people the laws and the
education, and the power of development for which
thev were fitted. No other laws, no other kind of

Introduction 3 3

government, will enable a people to prosper ex-
cept those laws to which they have grown and
are adapted. Only those institutions, I repeat, are
permanent which are based on the national char-
acter. That was the secret of King Alfred the
law-giver.

It may be asked, what manner of man to look at
was this great king ? His biographer, Asser, who
knew him well, has not thought fit to tell us. He
only says in words of flattery that Alfred was more
comely and gracious of aspect than his brothers.
These brothers, four in number, were all kings
before him, and all died young. Alfred himself
was afflicted by a disease which never left him. It
is therefore presumable that there was some con-
genital weakness in them all. This was not
physical weakness : whatever the disease, it did
not interfere with Alfred's courage or his prowess
in battle. This is proved by the fact that the
Saxon kings actually fought in person in the fore-
front of the battle, and on foot. Alfred, for in-
stance, fought in a dozen battles at least, and
always with the valour that belongs to a strong
man. I take him to have been a man of good
stature and of strong build : a man whose appear-
ance was kingly : who impressed his followers
with the gallant and confident carriage of a brave
soldier. But as to his face, or the colour of his
hair or eyes, I can tell nothing. Fair hair he had,

3

34 King Alfred

I think, and blue eyes : or the more common
type of brown hair and gray eyes. When a king
resigns all personal ambitions and seeks nothing
for himself, it seems natural and fitting that, while
his works live after him, he himself should vanish
without leaving so much as a tradition of his face
or figure.

From time to time in history generally in some
time of great doubt and trouble : or in some time
when the old ideals are in danger of being
forgotten : or in some time when the nation seems
losing the sense of duty and of responsibility :
there appears one, man or woman, who restores
the better spirit of the people by his example : by
his preaching : by his self-sacrifice : by his martyr-
dom. He is the prophet as priest : the prophet as
king : the prophet as law-giver. There passes in
imagination before us a splendid procession of men
and women who have thus restored a nation or
raised the fallen ideals. Among them we recognise
many faces : there are Savonarola : Francis of
Assisi : Joan of Arc : our own Queen Elizabeth,
greatest and strongest of all women : the Czar
Peter. But the greatest figure of them all the
most noble the most god-like is that of the
ninth-century Alfred, king of that little country
which you have upon your map. There is none
like Alfred in the whole page of history : none
with a record altogether so blameless : none so wise :

Introduction 3 5

none so human. We have allowed the memory of
him to be too much forgotten : only here and
there a historian such as Freeman or Green lifts
up his voice and proclaims aloud that he has no
words with which to speak adequately of this great
Englishman. Perhaps the noble lines of Tennyson,
written for another prince whose memory is dear
to us all, may be referred to Alfred :

Who reverenced his conscience as his king ;
Whose glory was, redressing human wrong ;
Who spake no slander, no, nor listen'd to it j
Who loved one only and who clave to her
We know him now : we see him as he moved :
How modest, kindly, all-accomplish'd, wise,
With what sublime repression of himself;
Not making his high place the lawless perch
Of wing'd ambitions, nor a vantage-ground
For pleasure ; but thro' all this tract of years
Wearing the white flower of a blameless life.

It is the purpose the wise and patriotic
purpose of certain persons to erect, for these and
other reasons, a monument, visible to all, to the
memory of King Alfred.

Some of the points which I have recalled in
this paper may help to show why such a monument
would have been fitting at any time during the last
thousand years. There is, however, a special
reason which makes the erection of such a monu-
ment very necessary I use the word necessary

36 King Alfred

advisedly at the present time. In the year 1897
on that memorable day when we were all drunk
with the visible glory and the greatness of the
Empire there arose in the minds of many a feeling
that we ought to teach the people the meaning of
what we saw set forth in that procession the mean-
ing of our Empire not only what it is, but how it
came through whose creation by whose founda-
tion. Now so much is Alfred the Founder that
every ship in our Navy might have his name
every school his bust : every Guildhall his statue.
He is everywhere. But he is invisible. And the
people do not know him. The boys do not learn
about him. There is nothing to show him. We
want a monument to Alfred, if only to make the
people learn and remember the origin of our
Empire if only that his noble example may be
kept before us, to stimulate and to inspire and to
encourage.

It seems unnecessary to urge that a monument
to Alfred must be set up in Winchester, and
not in London or in Westminster, or any-
where else. Here lies the dust of the kings his
ancestors, and of the kings his successors. Thirty-
five of his line made Winchester their capital :
twenty were buried in the Cathedral. In this city
Alfred received instruction from St. Swithin : the
city was already old and venerable when Alfred
was a boy. He was buried first in the Cathedral,

Introduction 37

and afterwards in the Abbey, which he himself
founded, hard by. The name of Alfred's country,
well-nigh forgotten, except by scholars, has been
revived of late years by a Wessex man Thomas
Hardy. But the name of Alfred's capital
continues in the venerable and historic city
of Winchester, which yields to none in Eng-
land for the monuments and the memories of
the past.

I venture, lastly, to express my own personal
hope that great as were the achievements of Alfred
the keynote to be struck and to be maintained
will be that Alfred is, and will always remain, the
typical man of our race call him Anglo-Saxon,
call him American, call him Englishman, call him
Australian the typical man of our race at his best
and noblest. I like to think that the face of the
Anglo-Saxon at his best and noblest is the face of
Alfred. I am quite sure and certain that the mind
of the Anglo-Saxon at his best and noblest is the
mind of Alfred : that the aspirations, the hopes,
the standards of the Anglo-Saxon at his best and
noblest are the aspirations, the hopes, the standards
of Alfred. He is truly our Leader, our Founder,
our King. When our monument takes shape
and form let it somehow recognise this great, this
cardinal fact. Let it show somehow by the
example of Alfred the Anglo-Saxon at his best and
noblest here within the circle of the narrow seas,

38 King Alfred

or across the ocean ; wherever King Alfred's lan-
guage is spoken ; wherever King Alfred's laws
prevail ; into whatever fair lands of the wide world
King Alfred's descendants have penetrated.

WALTER BESANT.

ALFRED AS KING

BY FREDERIC HARRISON

ALFRED AS KING

T is a commonplace with historians
and with the historians of many
countries and different schools of
opinion that our English Alfred was
the only perfect man of action recorded in history ;
for Aurelius was occasionally too much of the philo-
sopher ; Saint Louis usually too much of the saint ;
Godfrey too much of the Crusader ; the great
Emperors were not saints at all ; and of all more
modern heroes we know too much to pretend that
they were perfect. Of all the hyperboles of praise
there is but one that we can safely justify with the
strictest canons of historic research. Of all the
names in history there is only our English Alfred
whose record is without stain and without weak-
ness who is equally amongst the greatest of men
in genius, in magnanimity, in valour, in moral
purity, in intellectual force, in practical wisdom,
and in beauty of soul. In his recorded career
from infancy to death, we can find no single
trait that is not noble and suggestive, nor a

42 King Alfred

single act or word that can he counted as a
flaw.

In the history of modern Europe there is
nothing which can compare in duration and in
organic continuity with the unbroken evolution of
our English nation. And now that the royal
house of France has passed from the sphere of
political realities into that of historic memories,
there is no dynasty in Europe which can be named
in the same breath with that which has seen a suc-
cession of forty-nine sovereigns since Alfred ; nor
has any King or Cassar a record of ancestry which
can compare with that of the royal Lady who
through thirty-two generations traces her lineal
descent to the Hero-King of Wessex.

We have long given up the venerable fables
which once gathered round the name of Alfred, as
round Romulus, or Theseus, King Arthur, or the
Cid. Every schoolboy knows that Alfred was
not formally King of all England ; nor did he
introduce trial by jury, or electoral institutions; he
did not found the University of Oxford ; nor
write all the pieces which are attributed to his pen ;
he was perhaps too practical a man to let his
own supper get burnt on the hearth ; and too wary
a general to go about masquerading with a harp
in the enemy's camp. But the historic Alfred
whom we know to-day is a personage more splendid
and lifelike than the legendary Alfred ever was.

As King 43

Though much of what our grandsires believed about
Alfred is now known to be poetry and pious fraud,
the traditional Alfred was quite just in general
effect, and modern research has given us a portrait
both nobler and more definite than that drawn by
the patriotic imagination of a less critical age.
Patriotic imagination itself falls far short of scrupu-
lous scholarship when it seeks to draw the likeness
of a real hero.

It is true that the field of Alfred's achievements
was relatively small, and the whole scale of his
career was modest indeed when compared with that
of his imperial compeers. He inherited a king-
dom which covered only a few English counties,
and at one time his realm was reduced to a smaller
area than that of some private landlords of modern
times. Beside the great Emperor Charles, or the
German Ottos, Henrys, and Fredericks of the
Middle Ages, his dominions, his resources, his
armies, his battles, his fleets, his administrative
machinery, his contemporary glory all these were
almost in miniature hardly a tithe of theirs. But,
we should remember, it is quality not quantity
that weighs in the impartial scales of History. True
human greatness needs no vast territories as its stage
nor do multitudes add to its power. That which
tells in the end is the living seed of the creative mind,
the heroic example, the sovereign gift of leader-
ship, the undying inspiration of genius and faith.

44 King Alfred

Turn to the Chronicle and to Asser's Life, with
recent historians and scholars, and mark those
miracles of patience, valour, indomitable energy by
which the great king rescued from the savage
Norsemen the England of our forefathers. Watch
him as he returns to the charge after every repulse,
rallies his exhausted men, gathers up new armies,
plans fresh methods of war, and at last wins for his
people prosperity, honour, and peace. The scale of
these campaigns was narrow the armies were small
not indeed weaker than were the Greeks at Ther-
mopylae and Marathon ; but the annals of war
have nothing grander than the long record of
sagacious heroism by which Alfred saved England
for the English. Then note the genius with
which he saw that the Norsemen must be met on
the sea, with which he organised a navy of ships
built on a new design of his own. Alfred is not
only the forerunner of Marlborough and Welling-
ton, but he was the first to teach the Saxon to be
a seaman.

A fine land that had once known prosperity,
and even culture, lay utterly ruined and desolate
when Alfred undertook the vast task of its restora-
tion its material, moral, intellectual reform. He
said in his Will, "we were all despoiled by the
Heathen Folk." He found the enemy in posses-
sion of something like a standing army of
disciplined soldiers ; and we should note how the

As King 45

Chronicle calls the Norsemen " the army." He
met this by instituting a regular militia with
local garrisons and a reserve force capable of
systematic war. When Alfred marshals a new
campaign we find that the era of wild raids to be
met by casual musters of countrymen is a thing of
the past. Alfred at last has his " army " too. We
are dealing with regular armies capable of sustain-
ing organised campaigns.

A navy needed to be created and not simply
reformed. And the safety of the southern shores
of England the first command of the Channel
must be dated from the day when Alfred began
the formation of an adequate fleet. It is true that
in the absence of competent seamen in Wessex,
he had to man his earliest ships with Frisians from
over the sea. But in later years he came to have
a really English fleet of his own. And it is plain
that in a true sense he is the inventor, but not the
actual founder, of a national navy : of that sea-
power which is the birthright of this island.

When Alfred was chosen king, " almost against
his will," we are told, the prospect was one to
appal the stoutest heart. In his boyhood the
Northmen had begun to winter in Kent, had taken
Canterbury and London by storm, and pushed up
the Thames. A few years later they stormed
Winchester and ravaged Kent. In the reign of
his brother, Ethelred, they stormed York, and

46 King Alfred

invaded Mercia, whose king, Burhred, had married
Alfred's sister. They next laid waste East Anglia,
martyred its king, Edmund, and threatened
Wessex. The Danes (as they were now known)
sailed up the Thames, and formed a camp round
Reading. In a fierce battle at Ashdown a victory
had been won for the moment by the energy and
valour of Alfred ; but defeats followed, Surrey
was lost, and Ethelred died, it is supposed of his
wounds.

The young king of twenty-two came to the
throne of his ancestors in a dark hour. The
supremacy of Wessex in England, won by his
grandfather, Egbert, had vanished. Northumbria,
Mercia, East Anglia, and parts of Wessex had
been desolated ; the abbeys had been sacked, the
monks murdered, the churches, schools, and home-
steads ruined. The Danish invaders were masters
of all Northern, Eastern, and Central England,
and the heart of Wessex was open to assault.
The young king met them at Wilton with a small
force, but after a stubborn fight was beaten off.
He was forced to purchase a precarious truce.

In this year, 871, the Chronicle relates (in its
grim, laconic style), the [Danish] army came to
Reading, and three nights after, the Alderman
Ethelwulf fought them. Four nights after this,
Ethelred and Alfred led a large force to Reading,
and " there was great slaughter on both sides ;

As King 47

the Alderman Ethelwulf was slain, and the Danes
held possession of the battle place." " And four
nights after, Ethelred and Alfred fought with all
the army at Ashdown " ; many thousands were
slain ; " and they were fighting until night."
And fourteen nights after, King Ethelred and
Alfred his brother fought against the army at
Basing, and there the Danes gained the victory.
" And two months after, King Ethelred and
Alfred his brother fought against the army at
Merton . . . and there was great slaughter on
each side, but the Danes held possession of the
battle place. And after this fight there came a
great summer force [of Danes] to Reading. And
the Easter after, King Ethelred died. Then
Alfred his brother succeeded to the kingdom of
the West Saxons, and one month after, with a small
force, he fought against all the army at Wilton, but
the Danes held possession of the battle place.
And this year nine great battles were fought
against the army in the kingdom south of the
Thames ; besides which Alfred, the king's brother,
and individual aldermen, and king's thanes, often
rode raids on them, which were not reckoned'''

Such were the disasters with which Alfred's
reign began. His fighting-men were exhausted or
slaughtered ; his kingdom torn from side to side,
and its chief towns stormed : the northern, central,
and eastern kingdoms had been blotted out.

48 King Alfred

Burhred of Mercia was driven over sea, and
Wessex was forced to buy a brief rest with gold.
Alfred equipped a few ships and gained some
temporary success. But soon after, the Danes
with a great fleet swept round the south coast
and penetrated into Dorsetshire and Devonshire.
Thence passing northwards into Gloucestershire,
and reinforced by a new fleet in the Bristol
Channel, the Danish host suddenly fell upon Wilt-
shire. The Saxon defence was broken in pieces.
"The [Danish] army harried the West Saxons'
land, and settled there, and drove over sea much
of the people, and of the rest the most they
harried. And the people submitted to them, save
the King Alfred ; and he, with a little band, with-
drew to the woods and fastnesses in the moors"

Alfred seemed utterly ruined. He, the grand-
son of Egbert overlord of England, the successor
on the throne of Wessex of his father and his three
brothers, had been king just seven years, and in
scores of battles he had been fighting the Danes
for ten years. He had seen the three northern
kingdoms of Angles broken up and the reigning
house in each exterminated. Step by step he had
seen Kent, Surrey, and Wessex overrun ; assailed
by sea and land, from the coast, the rivers, and the
Bristol Channel. His own people had been driven
across sea, or crushed into submission ; and he
himself, with a small band of followers, was forced

As King 49

to find shelter in woods and swamps. His lot
seemed hopeless, but he alone did not despair.

The crisis was indeed the gravest to which our
country has ever been exposed. The Danish host
was now a large and disciplined army bent on con-
quering and settling new lands, and already masters
of the island from the Severn to the Tees. They
were the fiercest and rudest of the tribes which
had broken into Europe ; Heathens, full of hatred
and scorn for the religion, culture, arts, and
civilisation of Christendom. With a real genius for
war, both by sea and land, fired with the thirst of
glory and adventure, they were better armed, more
mobile, more martially organised than Saxon,
Angle, or Jute. Short of a miracle their ultimate
triumph over the whole island seemed certain.
Had it been achieved, the civilisation of England
would have been retarded for ages. Christianity,
learning, arts, and legislation, which had progressed
for two centuries, would have been stamped out,
and our island would have been the seat of a
barbarous and heathen horde. From the nature
of their island conquest and their own mastery of
the seas, they could not have been absorbed in
Christendom so rapidly as were the Normans of
France, or the Danubian tribes of Germany. They
might have resisted for centuries both conversion
and conquest from Europe. Nay more, from the
supreme opportunities afforded by our island and all

4

50 King Alfred

its resources as a basis for an imperial race, it is
too probable that the heathen Danes, once firmly
seated in the whole of Britain, might have proved
the lasting scourge of Europe itself. From this
tremendous peril, England and Europe were saved
by the genius of our Saxon hero.

In the Easter of that year, 878, the Chronicle
relates, " Alfred, with a little band, wrought a
fortress at Athelney, and from that work warred
on the army, with that portion of the men of
Somerset that was nearest." Athelney was a bit
of firm ground in the morasses formed by the
Parret and the Tone in Somersetshire. There, for
a few months, the king organised a new army,
drawn from Somerset and Wilts and such Hants
men as were left. In May he suddenly dashed
out of the wood of Selwood : " his Wessex men
were rejoiced to see him " : he fought a great fight
against the whole "army" at Ethandune, near
Westbury, put them to flight and drove them to
their camp, where, after fourteen days of siege, he
forced the Danes to surrender. It was a crushing
victory the turning-point in the life of Alfred
in the life of England.

The importance of it was this. A part of the
beaten host sailed away over seas. But the rest,
under their king, Guthrum, agreed to accept
Christian baptism, to withdraw out of Wessex and
the western half of Mercia, and to settle peaceably

As King 51

in East Anglia, north of Thames. Guthrum,
with thirty of his chiefs, came to Alfred's strong-
hold, received at his baptism the Saxon name of
Athelstan from his victor and god-father, remained
twelve days with the king and gave large presents.
By the Peace of Wedmore, 878, Wessex and
West England were saved, and the ultimate in-
corporation of the Danes with Christendom was
secured. At first sight and in strict form, Alfred
had surrendered Eastern England to the conqueror.
The Treaty was not honestly observed by the
Danes, and Guthrum and his warriors again
became enemies. But the core of England was
saved ; the amalgamation of Dane and Saxon was
founded in principle and in distant effect. And
the Peace of Wedmore was a stroke of genius
more daring and more far-reaching in result than
the splendid victory of Ethandune by which it had
been won.

Leaving the Danes for the present undisturbed
in all Eastern England between Thames and Tees,
Alfred occupied himself with restoring his shattered
and desolated Kingdom of Wessex. His treasury
was empty, the towns were in ruins, and civil
government paralysed. He built forts, abbeys,
and schools ; repeopled and stocked waste districts ;
and set to work to establish something like a stand-
ing military force to meet the regular " army " of
Danes. Hitherto Alfred had commanded loose

52 King Alfred

levies of half-armed men, who by custom disbanded
after two months' service. This had enabled small
but organised bands of Danes to overrun England,
and to win practical successes even when beaten by
numbers in the fields. Alfred, like William of
Normandy in the eleventh, like Cromwell in
the seventeenth century, saw, even so early as the
ninth century, that victory belonged not to numbers
but to regular armies. He organised what was at
least a permanent local militia, with definite quotas
of levies and an alternate system of reserves, besides
the garrisons of fortified places. He rebuilt the
broken fortresses, exercised his men in entrench-
ments, and adapted from the Danes their military
arts.

But his eye of genius foresaw that the country
was not safe whilst the invaders had command of
the seas. Thus he organised a fleet, and assessed
the ports and maritime districts to support it. He
himself ultimately designed a class of ship, longer
and swifter than those in use, though at first he
had to man his navy with mercenary Frisians and
sea-rovers. Towards the close of his reign, and
in that of his son and grandson, a genuine English
navy asserted its command of the Channel, which
two centuries later his feeble successors lost again.

He then turned to reorganise the system of
justice, making the judges the direct ministers of
the sovereign, personally responsible to him, and

As King 53

subject in certain cases to his final appeal. His bio-
grapher tells us that he keenly revised unjust judg-
ments, and tradition exaggerated this into a pre-
posterous legend. He caused a collection of the
old laws to be compiled carefully resisting any
general new legislation, or the fusion of the Wessex,
Mercian, and Kentish customs into a symmetrical
code. His laws were a compilation, with selection
of what was approved best, and rejection of what
was condemned as obsolete or mischievous. In
the spirit of conservative amendment which marks
his whole career, he is careful to tell us that he
" durst not venture to set down much of his own."
He was content with partial revision and excision,
under the advice of his Witan.

The combination in a code of Saxon, Anglian,
and Kentish " dooms " gave a certain stimulus
towards national union in a larger aggregate. But
a much more powerful cause unexpectedly emerged
out of the Danish invasions. By these savage
shocks the royal houses that had ruled in Mercia,
in East Anglia, in Northumbria, were not only
overthrown, but were extinct. Alfred remained
the one victorious king of the race of Cerdic, the
legitimate sovereign of Wessex and Kent, the
natural source of kingly authority wherever Danes
were not in possession of rule. Having won back
the western half of Mercia by the Peace of Wed-
more, Alfred became its king by silent consent of

54 King Alfred

its Anglian people. He did not fuse West Mercia
with Wessex ; he was not formally installed or
crowned. He made Ethelred, the husband of his
daughter Ethelfleda, alderman, and himself exer-
cised the functions of king, with a separate Mercian
administration and Witan. By this wise and tenta-
tive system of dual monarchy, Alfred was firmly
seated the undisputed sovereign of Southern Eng-
land from the mouth of the Thames to the Exe,
ruling by his son-in-law all Central England west
of Watling Street from the Severn to the Kibble.
He thus became, but a few years after his romantic
sortie from Athelney, the most powerful ruler
holding the widest single realm within our island.
This effected a practical supremacy over the main
part of England proper, except for the Danes in
the east. And he thus made it possible that there
should be a true English kingdom, of which his
son Edward, and his grandson Athelstan, were
formally recognised as sovereigns.

More than once after the settlement effected at
Wedmore and the years of peace it brought, Alfred
had to meet formidable enemies both by sea and
land. But fierce as these campaigns were, they
did not imply such incessant warfare, such desperate
crises, as had made the first ten years of his early
manhood one long battle for life and home. Alfred
was now at least as well able to defend his country
from the Scandinavian invaders as were the rulers

As King 55

of France and Germany, on whom the storm burst
whenever the Northmen had been checked in
England.

Six years after the Peace of Wedmore Alfred
had to meet again a force of Danes which had
pushed up the Thames, and to chastise the East
Anglians who had violated the Treaty by a fresh
outbreak. A new treaty with Guthrum gave
Alfred possession of London and adjacent parts
of Middlesex, which were finally rescued from the
Danes, and annexed to English Mercia under its
alderman, Ethelred, Alfred's son-in-law. Again,
in the twenty-third year of Alfred's reign a new
body of Vikings from Norway descended on to
Wessex and were joined by a second rising of the
Anglian Danes. For more than two years the
war was continued over a large part of England
from the Thames and its affluents across to the
Severn ; from Exeter northwards to Chester. By
a series of vigorous and skilful campaigns, in con-
certed strategy of armies and fleets, the king, his
son and his son-in-law, defeated this formidable
combination, captured the entire Danish fleet,
overawed the Britons of Wales and Cornwall,
forced the East Anglian Danes to keep within
their own reserves, and drove the northern free-
booters across the Channel. Once again, in the
last years of his reign, Alfred had to meet a new
invasion of pirates at sea, who were defeated in a

56 King Alfred

series of fierce and bloody encounters. These are
the last recorded campaigns of the king, who
from his boyhood, for nearly thirty years, had
been continually in arms ; but, by obstinate wars
and sagacious policy, he had tamed the savage
Norsemen, and at length transmitted to his
descendants a kingdom doubled and trebled in
extent and greatly increased in culture and
strength.

England had been rescued from barbarism by
the heroism of Alfred and his aptitude for war.
But it is his genius as a creative statesman which
left permanent effects on the history of England
and made him one of the principal founders of the
greatness of our country. His conversion and
settlement of Guthrum's Danes in East Anglia, his
generous forbearance and his repeated treaties with
them in spite of their faithless conduct, Jed to the
ultimate amalgamation of Dane, Angle, and Saxon,
which created the compound English race. A less
sagacious victor would have sought to clear his
country of Norsemen, and would undoubtedly
have been overwhelmed by successive invasions
himself. Alfred's whole career shows a conscious
purpose to break with the tribal and local isolation
of the West Saxon, to attach Wessex with Mercia,
to civilise Dane and Briton, and to bring England
into closer union with the religious and political
system of Europe.

As King 57

Alfred's restoration of London was the stroke
of a true statesman. The city had been stormed
by the Norsemen in 851, and since then had been
desolate and almost deserted, save when occupied
by the Danes as winter-quarters, as it was in 872.
Within the Danish power it remained until 886, the
year of Alfred's second treaty with Gu thrum. By
that it was ceded to him with the adjacent part
of Middlesex. The king rebuilt its walls and
repeopled it, and added it to Mercia, from which
it was not again separated. The military and
political genius of Alfred and his long experience
of war with the Danes had seized on the immense
importance of a restored London, carved out of
Danish East Anglia, with power to block all
incursions up the Thames and its various tributary
rivers. The restoration of London by the King
of Wessex was thus an epoch in the history, not
only of the city itself, but of the country of which
it was destined by nature to be the capital.

Alfred had been at this date fifteen years on
the throne, and the whole aspect of affairs was
changed. When he began to reign heathen
barbarians were masters of the Eastern, Central,
and Northern parts of England, and threatened to
break up Wessex. They swept round all coasts,
and pushed up the rivers, plundering, burning,
raiding, and slaughtering. Now, they were shut
up in East Anglia, outwardly christianised, bound

58 King Alfred

by formal treaties of peace, confronted at sea by
strong fleets, and gradually submitting to the
moral force of superior civilisation. As Goths
and Franks were overawed by the Roman empire
they conquered, so Vikings and Danes gradually
recognised the higher organisation of Wessex.
Alfred at last ruled over a compact realm stretching
from the Channel up to the Kibble, with fortresses
in such places as Rochester, London, Exeter, and
Chester. Lastly, in a rebuilt London, he was
master of the Thames, with a powerful base on
the Danish side of the great river.

As Alfred, we are told, was at Rome in his
sixth year, and had subsequently been with his
father at the Court of Charles the Bald, whose
daughter Judith became the boy's step-mother, the
young king must have been impressed by his
memories of foreign lands. His yearly embassies
with offerings to the Pope, and the restoration of
the Saxon College at Rome, bear witness to his
close relations with the See. He married his own
daughter, Elfrida, to Baldwin II., Count of
Flanders, son of the same Judith, and ancestor of
Matilda, wife of the Conqueror. This brought
about a connection between England and Flanders,
both so much threatened by Northmen invaders.

With the Britons of Cornwall and Wales
Alfred's policy showed the same moderation,
sagacity, and practical skill. They were not

As King 59

dangerous unless united and in active combination
with Danes. By the creation of English Mercia,
he effectively cut them off from East Anglia ; and
his whole policy was directed to detach them by
separate tribes and to win them into peaceful union
with his own people. He had to fight them in
groups from time to time, but he never attempted
to conquer or annex them in the mass. And after
the failure of the house of Roderick, of North
Wales, Alfred secured a recognised supremacy
over both North and South Welsh. His wise,
firm, and victorious government impressed the
smaller and more backward tribes on all sides ; so
that, without demanding any formal subjection,
his paramount authority was recognised over the
island, whilst his sphere of influence was extended
to Northumbrians and Scots. The defence and
reorganisation of Wessex had founded a sentiment
of national unity, which was ultimately to be con-
solidated in a formal kingdom of all England.
He made Wessex an organic, civilised, and pro-
gressive kingdom, and created it as the type which
England was to follow.

It was the same idea of bringing England into
the European world which suggested Alfred's very
remarkable series of distant voyages and missions.
The characteristic account of the discoveries of
Ohthere and Wulfstan round the North Cape and
in the Baltic, which Alfred inserts into his trans-

60 King Alfred

lation of Orosius, testifies to the king's strong
interest in the geography and ethnography of
Europe. The expedition which he despatched to
India, it is said, in 883, to the shrines of St. Thomas
and St. Bartholomew, in accordance with his vow
when he recovered London from the Danes, was a
really extraordinary feat for that age ; and, though
some of the MSS. read Judea for India, it is
thought that the mission was really sent to
Christian churches then known to exist in India.
Asser relates that the king received letters and
presents from the patriarch of Jerusalem ; a tale
which the later writers considerably embellish. A
deep impression was left by Alfred's zeal to extend
his foreign relations with distant lands.

His policy of calling in men of learning, teachers,
ecclesiastics, and seamen from countries outside his
own, is more fully recorded. Asser, the learned and
excellent monk of St. David's, was brought out of
Wales and pressed into the service of the king,
whose friend, counsellor, and biographer he became.
Plegmund was brought out of Mercia and made
Archbishop of Canterbury ; another Mercian,
Werfrith, Bishop of Worcester, was the constant
adviser of the king, both in literary and in state
affairs. Grimbald was brought from the mon-
astery of St. Omcr ; and John, of Saxony, from
the monastery of Corbey. With these came learned
monks to organise the new abbeys and schools

As King 6 1

which Alfred founded. He encouraged foreign
traders, and summoned artists and craftsmen from
the Continent to direct his buildings and arts.
Until his Saxons had learned seamanship, he en-
gaged Frisians to man his ships, and took into his
service adventurous Vikings such as Ohthere and
Wulfstan.

Alfred has left us his own conception of what a
king should be : and no preacher or moralist has
ever drawn the portrait in grander lines :

Power is never a good, unless he be good that has it ;
so it is the good of the man, not of the power. If power
be goodness, therefore is it that no man by his dominion
can come to the virtues, and to merit ; but by his virtues
and merit he comes to dominion and power. Thus no
man is better for his power ; but if he be good, it is from
his virtues that he is good. From his virtues he becomes
worthy of power, if he be worthy of it. . . . By wisdom
you may come to power, though you should not desire the
power. You need not be solicitous about power, nor
strive after it. If you be wise and good, it will follow
you, though you should not wish it.

Ah ! Wise One, thou knowest that greed and the
possession of this earthly power never were pleasing to me,
nor did I ever greatly desire this earthly kingdom save
that I desired tools and materials to do the work that
it was commanded me to do. This was that I might
guide and wield wisely the authority committed to me.
Why ! thou knowest that no man may understand any
craft or wield any power, unless he have tools and
materials. Every craft has its proper tools. But the

62 King Alfred

tools that a king needs to rule are these : to have his land
fully peopled ; to have priestmen, and soldiermen, and
workmen. Yea ! thou knowest that without these tools
no king can put forth his capacity to rule. ... It was for
this I desired materials to govern with, that my ability to
rule might not be forgotten and hidden away. For every
faculty and authority is apt to grow obsolete and ignored,
if it be without wisdom ; and that which is done in
unwisdom can never be reckoned as skill. This will I
say that I have sought to live worthily the while I lived^
and after my life to leave to the men that come after me a
remembering of me in good works.

Ah ! my soul, one evil is stoutly to be shunned. It
is that which most constantly and grievously deceives all
those who have a nature of distinction, but who have not
attained to full command of their powers. This is the
desire of false glory and of unrighteous power, and of
immoderate fame of good deeds above all other people.
For many men desire power that they may have fame,
though they be unworthy, for even the most depraved
desire it also. But he that will investigate this fame
wisely and earnestly, will perceive how little it is,
how precarious, how frail, how bereft it is of all that is
good.

Glory of this world ! Why do foolish men with
a false voice call thee glory ? Thou art not so. More
men have pomp and glory and worship from the opinion
of foolish people, than they have from their own works.

They say a certain king cried : he had a naked
sword hanging over his head by a small thread ready at
a moment to cut short his life. It was so always to
me. ,

As King 63

Alfred's relations to the Church were wholly with-
out a cloud or a blot alike free from the violence
or the impolicy which too often discredited even
the noblest sovereigns of his age. From the hour
when the child Prince of four was anointed by
Pope Leo in Rome, down to the day when the
Canons laid his bones in the Old Minster of
Winchester, the career of Alfred presents to us the
purest type of the normal relations between the
temporal and spiritual powers a type of more
wisdom than that of St. Henry or St. Louis, more
truly spiritual than that of the Emperors Charles
or Otto. To Alfred, Religion, Culture, Intelligence
had no local limits. He was essentially European,
even cosmopolitan, in his genius. As a boy he had
witnessed the inauguration of the new Papal Rome
on the Vatican. He had been at the Court of the
great Frank King, whose daughter became his
step-mother ; he had known all that was foremost
in the civilisation of the century : he resolved to
transplant it to England. His missions were his
message to the world that Britain was no longer
an ultima Thule, but henceforth was to march in
the van of Progress. He was, says Freeman,
" the spiritual and intellectual leader of his
people."

It is in his own writings that we come to
love Alfred best. No ruler of men has left us
so pellucid a revelation of his own soul. As in

64 King Alfred

Meditations of Aurelius and the Psalms of David,
there is given to men the outpourings of his aspira-
tions and his sorrows. Neither Richelieu, Crom-
well, nor William the Silent ever recorded more
frankly their problems and their aims. In the
authentic writings of Alfred we are in the presence
of one who is a teacher as much as a king who
recalls to us Augustine and a-Kempis, or Bunyan
and Jeremy Taylor. His Boethius served him as
texts whereon he preached to his people profound
sermons on the moral and spiritual life. Read his
homily on Riches " that it is better to give than
to receive," on the true Ruler " that power is
never a good, unless he be good that has it," on
the uses of Adversity "no wise man should
desire a soft life." Few men ever had so hard a
life with his mysterious and cruel malady " his
thorn in the flesh " until his early death with his
distracted and ruined kingdom his ferocious
enemies his never-ending cares. And amidst it
all we have the king in his silent study pouring
out poetic thoughts upon married love, or friend-
ship, on true happiness, or the inner life, compos-
ing pastoral poetry, or casting into English old
idylls from Greek epic or myth, ending with some
magnificent Te Deum of his own composition.

And with all this spiritual fervour, this literary
genius, this passion for culture, how wonderful is
the many-sided energy of the man his skill and

As King 65

delight as a huntsman, his love of ballad, anecdote,
and merry tale, his love of all noble art, his zeal
as a great builder, his ingenuity in mechanical
contrivance, his invention for measuring time, his
planning a new type of battleship his supreme
foresight in refounding the desolated city of
London. No man ever so perfectly fulfilled the
rule " Without haste, without rest." " I have
desired," he wrote, " to live worthily while I
lived, and after my life to leave to the men that
should be after me a remembrance in good works."
And Alfred "the truth -teller" as an annalist
calls him never uttered words more true.

Alfred's name is almost the only one in the long
roll of our national worthies which awakens no
bitter, no jealous thought, which combines the
honour of all ; Alfred represents at once the ancient
monarchy, the army, the navy, the law, the litera-
ture, the poetry, the art, the enterprise, the industry,
the religion of our race. Neither Welshman, nor
Scot, nor Irishman can feel that Alfred's memory
has left the trace of a wound for his national pride.
No difference of Church arises to separate any who
would join to do Alfred honour. No saint in the
Calendar was a more loyal and cherished member
of the ancient faith ; and yet no Protestant can
imagine a purer and more simple follower of the
Gospel. Alfred was a victorious warrior whose
victories have left no curses behind them : a king

5

66 King Alfred

whom no man ever charged with a harsh act : a
scholar who never became a pedant : a saint who
knew no superstition : a hero as bold as Launcelot
as spotless as Galahad.

No people, in ancient or modern times, ever
had a hero-founder at once so truly historic, so
venerable, and so supremely great. Alfred was
more to us than the heroes in antique myths
more than Theseus and Solon were to Athens, or
Lycurgus to Sparta, or Romulus and Numa were
to Rome more than St. Stephen was to Hungary,
or Pelayo and the Cid to Spain more than Hugh
Capet and Jeanne d'Arc were to France more
than William the Silent was to Holland nay,
almost as much as the Great Charles was to the
Franks.

The life-work of the Great Alfred has had a
continuity, an organic development, a moral, intel-
lectual, and spiritual majesty which has no parallel
or rival amongst rulers in the annals of mankind.
He is the father of English History, the founder
of English prose. He gave impulse and form to
the English Chronicle^ the oldest national record in
modern Europe. He formed himself, or dictated,
an organic prose literature, which was kept in
current use until the Norman Conquest. His
mark as a king is the creative mind the organis-
ing genius. His whole life, as recorded in act and
as imagined in his own ideals, has the stamp of

As King 67

supreme insight, practical wisdom, self-control,
devotion to duty. His passion for poetry, his love
for history, his dignity, his grace, his tenderness,
his manly piety all alike are spontaneous and
beautiful all are in harmony, none are in excess.

ALFRED AS A RELIGIOUS MAN
AND AN EDUCATIONALIST

BY THE BISHOP OF BRISTOL

ALFRED AS A RELIGIOUS MAN AND
AN EDUCATIONALIST

I

HIS EARLY YEARS

Earliest years Visits to Rome Purpose of such visits His
father's will His education Saxon poetry His
mother's book His religious interest His desire for
learning Musical skill His religious wars He
becomes king.

HE original sources of information
from which this chapter is drawn are
fairly numerous. Asser's Life of
Alfred is of course the chief source ;
but Alfred's laws, Alfred's translations, Alfred's
will, all throw much light on his character as a
religious man ; and the translations tell us some-
thing of his views on education, besides what we
learn from the record of his actions.

Alfred's mother was Osburga ; Asser tells us
that she was a very religious woman, noble
alike in family and by her own disposition. His

72 King Alfred

father Ethelwulf gave him an early training in
devotion to the faith of Christ. In the year 853,
which Asser declares to have been the fifth year
of Alfred's life though some say his eleventh
year, which would seem more probable Ethelwulf
sent him to Rome with an honourable escort of
nobles and commoners. Pope Leo IV. received
him, anointed him for king, and adopted him as
his spiritual son. This may mean that Alfred was
confirmed in Rome ; Ethelwerd, a descendant of
Alfred, believed that it referred to baptism. Another
account states that the Pope anointed him king of
the Demetians ; but that seems out of the question,
as he had four brothers older than himself. The
statement may be due to the fact that some years
after Alfred became king, the kings and people
of that part of Wales made submission to him. 1
Two years later Ethelwulf himself went to Rome,
with great honour, and took with him Alfred,
because he loved him more than his other sons.
A long list of Ethelwulf's gifts was given by
Anastasius in his Lives of the Popes ; they were
very magnificent if the record is true. The father

1 We still have, at Llantwit Major, the beautiful monument set up by one
of the kings who thus made submission, Howel, son of Ris. The Latin is
not as good as the decoration of the monument : n't nomine di fatris et
spiritus santdi anc crucem kouelt properabit pro anima res fatris eus. The monu-
ment is a singularly beautiful " wheel " cross with broad stem. It has long
been broken in two. It lies on the ground in the remarkable western portion
of the double church at Llantwit.

As Religious Man and Educationalist 73

and son remained in Rome for a year. Alfred's
mother was, we must suppose, then dead, for
Ethelwulf took a new wife home with him,
Judith, the daughter of Charles the Bald.

We have in Ethelwulf's will an interesting
evidence of the impression made upon him by
Rome. It is as well to state such of the provisions
as have come down to us, for they are in them-
selves of importance, and they introduce us to
important facts of the time ; also, we shall then
have something with which to compare Alfred's
will when the time comes to deal with it. The
provisions show the kind of religious atmosphere
in which Alfred was brought up as a young boy.

Ethelwulf ordered that the money he left
behind him should be divided between his sons and
the nobles for the good of his soul. Further, for
the benefit of his soul, which from the first flower
of his youth he had studied in all things to pro-
mote, he directed that in all his hereditary
dominions one poor man for each ten hides of
land, either a native or a foreigner, 1 should be
provided with meat, drink, and clothing, by his
successors, even to the day of judgment. And
the curiously significant condition is imported, " if
the country should continue to be inhabited by
men and cattle, and not become deserted " : to such
an extent had the ravages of the Danish pirates

1 Possibly meaning an Englishman who was not a Wessex man.

74 King Alfred

gone. Also, and still for the good of his soul,
three hundred mancuses 1 were to go to Rome.
Their destination explains to us the religious
attraction which drew men in his time to the old
capital of the Western world. The journey was
dangerous ; 2 it was also expensive. 3 King Canute
spoke very strongly about this in his time. He
thanked God that he had been able to visit the holy
Apostles Peter and Paul. That was the aspect in
which the purpose of the pilgrimage to Rome pre-
sented itself to his mind, it was to visit the tombs
of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul. 4 But having
thanked God for his visit, he proceeded to complain
of the heavy demands upon " my archbishops "
when according to custom they visited the holy see
to receive the pall. " I complained in the presence
of the lord Pope, and said I was much displeased
on account of the immense sums of money which
were demanded of them " ; it was decreed that this
should cease. In like manner he settled with

1 The mancus was more than the third of a pound.

2 In 959, Alfsin, Archbishop of Canterbury, died in the Alps on his way
for the pall, overcome by the snow and the cold.

3 A hundred years before Alfred's time, Alcuin of York wrote to Bishop
Remedius of Coire, to beg him to let his messenger pass through the moun-
tains to Italy without payment of the heavy tolls.

4 Canute's descriptive letter is given by Florence, under the year 1031.
The argument used by Wilfrith at Whitby, and by Aldhelm in writing to
the Britons, had been brought to bear on the king. " I learned from wise
men that the holy Apostle Peter received of the Lord great power of binding
and loosing, and is the key-bearer of the heavenly kingdom, and thus I held it
mightily useful to seek diligently his more special patronage with the Lord."

As Religious Man and Educationalist 75

the emperor and with the Frank king that the
severity of the taxes by the way should be
relaxed. In 688 and 728, two of Alfred's pre-
decessors, Casdwalla and Ina, kings of Wessex,
wishing to visit Rome, resigned their kingdom
to carry out their wish. Bede tells us precisely
what their purpose was. It was that they
might visit the tombs of the blessed Apostles.
Ethelwulf, too, makes his object clear in his will.
One hundred mancuses were to go to Rome in
honour of St. Peter, specially to buy oil for filling
all the lamps of his apostolic church on Easter Eve
and at cock-crow ; also, one hundred mancuses
in honour of St. Paul, for the same purpose of
providing oil for the Church of St. Paul the
Apostle, to fill the lamps on Easter Eve and at
cock-crow ; and one hundred mancuses for the
universal apostolic pontiff. William of Malmes-
bury states that these were to be annual gifts, but
that is not supported by Asser, from whom William
takes his account.

It is interesting to note the agreement of these
gifts with the facts of the time. In 847 the
Saracens had attacked Rome. The great basilicas
of St. Peter and St. Paul were suburban churches,
outside the walls, and they were plundered and
desecrated. We are accustomed to the idea of
St. Paul's being fuori le mura, but St. Peter's, as
we know it, lies in a district surrounded by walls.

j6 King Alfred

This fortified district is called the Leonine City.
It owes its existence and its name to Leo IV., who
was Pope when Ethelwulf sent Alfred to Rome as
a boy. A concise account of the eight years' papacy
of Leo IV. would state that he devoted himself to
building the fortifications of the Leonine City,
that St. Peter's and the Vatican might no longer be
suburban, and to restoring the plundered and
desecrated churches of the two Apostles. Hence
Ethelwulf 's gifts to the two churches and the papal
purse. If the dates and periods given by Asser are
correct, Pope Leo died while the Saxon king and
prince were in Rome, and was succeeded by
Benedict III. In that case Alfred witnessed in the
autumn of 855 the significant spectacle of an anti-
pope stripping the Pope of his pontifical robes and
ruling for a time in the Lateran.

Under influences such as these Alfred was
brought up. His brothers appear to have been
sent out to great men of the kingdom to be edu-
cated, but Alfred was kept always at the king's
court, as the favourite son. He was specially
noted for the attention with which he listened to
the Saxon poems of earlier times, and the care
with which he stored them up in an excellent
memory. In after years he spoke of Aldhelm's
English songs and hymns as the best he knew ; * and

1 We learn this from William of Malmesbury, Aldhelm's own monas-
tery. William reports Alfred as saying that no one in any age equalled Aldhelm

As Religious Man and Educationalist 77

that was saying a great deal, for the national gift
of song, both sacred and secular, was great. It
would be difficult to find in the early records of
any nation a sacred song more touching and
beautiful than the stanzas of the " Dream of the
Holy Rood," incised in early Anglian runes upon
the great cross-shaft at Ruth well, itself a monu-
ment such as no other nation can show. The
fuller form of this great song, embodying the
earlier stanzas found on the Ruthwell cross, was
discovered at Vercelli two generations ago, in the
Wessex dialect of Alfred's time. That Alfred
knew by heart this among many other English
songs may be taken as certain. That it made
its religious mark on his mind cannot be doubted.

But, Asser remarks with a severe comment on
the neglect in this respect by his parents, the boy
Alfred had no book-learning at all. He was
trained in all bodily exercises, and he especially
learned and practised the art of hunting in all its
branches with surprising success ; an art so practical
then that Asser believed skill and good fortune in
hunting to be " among the gifts of God, as we have
often witnessed." But book-learning he had none.

It was his mother who gave him his first taste
for book-learning. If we are to accept the dates

in poetry, for he could make a poem, compose an air, and aptly either sing or
recite. A street-song common in Alfred's time was composed by Aldhelm.
See also p. 8 1 .

78 King Alfred

and statements of Asser as on the whole correct,
this must have been his step-mother, Judith, though
one of the statements would refer it to Osburga's
time. Alfred was about thirteen when the event
occurred ; he remained illiterate, Asser says, till he
was twelve years old or more. Those who take
the other view make him almost four at the time
of the following episode. There is no evidence
that Osburga had any learning, though her love
for Saxon ballad may be assumed. Judith, on the
other hand, was the daughter of a house which paid
much regard to learning and art. The beautiful
Bibles of her father are in existence still, and we can
well understand that she would try to win the
affection of her step-sons by showing them treasures
of a kind new to them. No one who has had the
privilege of handling and examining the books in
the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris can ever forget
the beauty of the manuscripts which belonged to
Charles le Chauve, Judith's father. The ivory
covers of his Psalter and his Book of the Gospels,
the beauty of the interior of those books, and the
fineness of his St. Denis Bible and his Metz Bible
(which is possibly the Bible prepared at Tours for
Charlemagne under the care of Alcuin), abundantly
convince us of the artistic taste of his family.
Their evidence could be largely supplemented from
the still-existing manuscripts of Charlemagne, Louis
le Debonnaire, and Lothaire.

As Religious Man and "Educationalist 79

His mother, then, one day showed to Alfred
and an older brother an ornamental manuscript of
Saxon poems. To tempt them to begin to learn
again the act of one who had not been respon-
sible for their ignorance of book-learning she
said she would give the book to the boy who
could first learn to read it. Alfred was delighted
with the beauty of the initial letter. He might
well be delighted if it approached the beauty of
the Lindisfarne gospels, wrought a century and a
half before, or the very different style of beauty
of the manuscript known as the Psalter of
Athelstane, with its Byzantine type and Teutonic
origin, parts of which Judith may well have seen
and handled. The initial letter of the first Psalm
in this Psalter would indeed have been a prize
for which a boy might face the pain of learning to
read, even a boy devoted to hunting.

Alfred spoke first, though the younger. " Will
you really give it to the one who can most quickly
understand and recite it before you?" She, glad
and smiling, said, " To him I will give it." He
took it from her hand, went to his master and
read it. When it was read, he brought it back
and recited it. It is not at all improbable that
Judith did not know of his power of memory, and
that instead of learning to read it, in our sense of
the word, he got his master to read it over till he
knew it by heart and could point with his finger

8o King Alfred

to the words as he recited them. John the Deacon,
writing in the same century, said that Pope Gregory
the Great (others ascribe it to Gregory III.)
invented musical notation as a memoria technica
to remind him of tunes he had learned by ear.

However that might be with Alfred, he had
got the taste for written words, which never left
him. He set to work to learn the daily course of
the religious services of the several hours ; and
then certain of the psalms ; and then a number
of prayers. All this collection he had in a little
book which he carried day and night in his
bosom. Asser, who joined him many years later,
often saw him use this little book to assist his
prayers, amid all the bustle and business of a king's
life. But still there is a hint that when this col-
lection was made it was only to him a representa-
tion of what he knew by heart ; for Asser says he
could not at that time gratify his most ardent
wish to learn liberal art, because, as Alfred told him,
there were then no good readers in all the king-
dom of the West Saxons. 1 Indeed, he confessed to
Asser with many lamentations and inmost sighs
of his heart that the greatest of all the difficulties
and impediments of his life had been that when
he was young, and had the capacity for learning,

1 A marginal note in the Cotton MS. remarks that this disposes of the
story of a school of literature at Oxford at that time. An interpolation in
Asser credits this school with the high approval of Germanus in A.D. 430.

As Religious Man and Educationalist 8 1

he could not find teachers ; and when he was more
advanced in life, he was so harassed by a disease
unknown to all the physicians of the island, as well
as by anxieties of sovereignty, internal and external,
and continual invasions of pagans, that there was no
time for reading, even his masters and writers being
to some extent disturbed in their occupations.
But yet he never to the end of his life ceased from
the insatiable desire of knowledge.

Asser makes no reference to his traditional skill
as a harpist and minstrel. Probably it was a
matter of course. Two hundred years before,
Casdmon, in Northumbria, had fled the festive
society of his labouring fellows, because he alone of
them, when the harp was passed to him in turn,
could not sing ; and the sense of isolation in this
respect wrought so strongly in his mind that in
the dreams of the night he created song, and
next morning he remembered the dignified and
stately creation. Aldhelm was singing in Wessex
in Caedmon's time, sitting on the parapet of
Malmesbury bridge, and beguiling people to sacred
thought by the attraction of his secular lays. 1 We
have no examples still surviving of English musical
notation of Alfred's time ; but many examples
exist of the next century, as, for instance, the
manuscript written in Wessex about eighty years
after Alfred's death for JEthelwold, Bishop of

1 See also note on p. 76.
6

82 King Alfred

Winchester, which includes the kyric Rex Splendens,
composed by Dunstan, who was born in 925.
There can practically be little doubt that Alfred
had a similar notation, consisting of very rudi-
mentary musical notes, with guide-letters showing
time and expression. It was, however, the cen-
tury after his death that saw the great develop-
ment of this principle in England. Up to that
time the tradition of the plain -song introduced
by Augustine had been handed down from ear to
ear. The chief use of our musical notation was to
guard against the loss or serious variation of the
traditional plain -song and the more complicated
additions made by Dunstan and other skilled
musicians. The Wessex churchmen learned their
rugged plain-song so well, that after the Norman
Conquest the monks of Glastonbury suffered death
at the hands of the Norman soldiers rather than
abandon their insular use for the lighter graces of
the plain-song of William of Fescamp.

Alfred's warfare against the Danes began before
he was king. It was in his eyes much more than
a warfare against violent invaders of his territory ;
it was to him, above all, a religious war. That the
enemy were pagans, and that part of their aim was
to obliterate Christianity, that was his chief stimulus.
To the Danes also it was a religious war. The
Angles and Saxons and Jutes, whose lands they
pillaged, were their own very distant cousins ;

A s Religious Man and Educationalist 8 3

they had in times past worshipped the same deities
whom now the Danes worshipped. To the Danes
they were renegades from the one religion which
the Danes held for truth. Asser knew well the
king's feeling on this subject. He describes at
some length the series of battles which brought
Alfred into prominence, and he describes them from
information received from Alfred. He never
describes the combatants as English and Danes ;
he always speaks of them as Christians and pagans.

The first instance we have of the bent of
Alfred's mind after he came to maturity occurs in
connection with this feeling on his part that to
fight the Danes was a religious work. In 871,
just before he came to the throne, the pagan army
fought against the Earl of Berkshire at Englefield,
and the Christians gained the victory. Four days
later, Alfred and his brother King Ethelred attacked
the pagans at Reading, where they had strong
fortifications. They cut to pieces such of the
pagans as they found outside the fortifications ;
but the main body of the pagans sallied forth,
and the Christians fled. Four days after, the
pagan army was on strong ground at ^scesdun, the
hill of the ash, and the Christians, in shame and in-
dignation, roused by the calamity at Reading, deter-
mined to attack them under Ethelred and Alfred.

Ethelred was a religious man, as Alfred was,
but his religion took practically a different form.

84 King Alfred

The king prepared for the fight by hearing mass,
and the army waited for him. The pagans did
not wait. Time pressed. Alfred, who was second
in command, became very anxious. The king,
who commanded the force arrayed against the
pagan king, was still set in prayer. He declared
he would not depart, alive, till the priest had done,
nor leave the divine service. Alfred was to deal
with the two pagan jarls ; he must either retreat or
charge without waiting for his brother. Relying
on the divine counsels he charged, and after a long
and severe fight, in which many of the leading
pagans were killed, the Christians won the day.
They strewed the whole plain of ^Escesdun with
pagans, slaughtered in their flight. Alfred him-
self, it should be observed, was from childhood a
frequent visitor of holy places, for the sake of
prayer and almsgiving. It was certainly not from
any disregard of prayer or of God's house and the
public worship of God that he fought while Ethel-
red heard mass.

That same year, after another great fight at
Basing in which the pagans got the victory, Alfred
became king on the death of his brother ; Ethel-
red's son Ethelwold being too young to reign.
A month later the pagans defeated him at Wilton.
Eight pitched battles in one year, besides endless
skirmishes by night and day in which Alfred and
his chief men were engaged without rest or cessa-

As Religious Man and Educationalist 8 5

tion against the pagans : that is Asser's summary
of the year which saw Alfred mount the throne of
the West Saxons.

The same note of a religious war is struck in
the campaign in which Alfred finally triumphed.
He issued forth from his stronghold in the marsh
of Athelney to make frequent assaults upon the
pagans. In the seventh week after Easter, 878,
he rode to Ecgbryht's Stone (Brixton-Deverill) in
the eastern part of the Selwood, or Great Wood,
in British Coit Mawr, and on the third day reached
Edington, where he fought with valour and per-
sistence against the pagans and defeated them
completely, killing all who were not within the
earthworks. The survivors he hemmed in for
fourteen days. At the end of that time the pagans
were worn out, and begged for terms of peace.
Their leader Guthrum proposed to become a
Christian. It was agreed that those who would
be baptized might settle in England ; those who
would remain pagan must leave the island. 1 In
the final terms, as in every phrase of Asser's story,
it stands out as a religious war, and as a great re-
ligious victory it ended. From that time Christian
Danes and Christian Saxons could agree.

1 In the form of treaty as it has come down to us, there is no mention of
Christianity, except so far as this, that it is confirmed by an oath for them-
selves and their " successors born and unborn who love God's mercy and ours."
The tradition probably mixes up the simple terms of peace with the events
that followed, and treats those events as the fulfilment of conditions.

II

HIS REIGN

His early years as king Communications with Rome
Education of his children and others His own labours
Religious exercises Introduction of learned men
Invention of candle-clocks Distribution of income
Foundation of monasteries Formation of his Manual
Embassies to foreign parts Ecclesiastical laws.

the early and distressful days of
Alfred's reign his position was almost
unbearable. He would not listen to
the appeals for help and protection
pressed upon him by his subjects. What was
there that he could do to help and protect them ?
He was maturing his plans ; meanwhile, he re-
pulsed his subjects, and paid, or seemed to pay, no
heed to their requests. The holy man St. Neot,
who was his relation some say his father's
brother often told him that he would suffer great
adversity on this account, but Alfred turned, or
seemed to turn, a deaf ear to the reproofs of the

As Religious Man and Educationalist 87

man of God. His sin, Asser tells us, did not go
unpunished ; Alfred fell into so great misery that
sometimes none of his subjects knew where he was
or what had become of him. If this is true, it
is sufficiently accounted for by his grave anxieties,
and the terrible and mysterious disease which
seized him suddenly in the midst of his marriage
feast in 868, three years before his accession, and
never left him free from pain, or the threat
of pain, from the twentieth to the forty-fourth
year of his age. But most probably the episode
is merely part of the legendary life of St.
Neot, inserted after Asser's time in his Life of
Alfred.

Among other cares of the first ten or eleven years
of his reign, he turned his attention to the English
school in Rome, and persuaded Pope Martin to
free it from tribute and tax. This is the Pope
who absolved Bishop Formosus from his ex-
communication by Pope John VIII. and from
his vow not to return to Rome ; a reversal
which led to the trial and condemnation of the
dead body of Formosus, mentioned on a later
page.

Alfred was now free to devote himself to the
restoration of religion and learning. His own
family management was a pattern to all. His
youngest son, Ethelwerd, was sent to the schools
which Alfred had by that time established. Here

88 King Alfred

he was taught in company with the children of
almost all the nobility of the kingdom, and many
that were not noble. They learned to read both
Latin and Saxon books, and they learned to write ;
so that by the time they were ready to practise
the manly arts hunting and such pursuits as be-
fitted noblemen they had become studious and
clever in the liberal arts. His older children
had been taught at home, and no less care-
fully. They learned the Psalms and read Saxon
books, especially Saxon poems ; at the time
when Asser wrote, Edward and Ethelswith 1
were continually in the habit of making use of
books.

The king himself led a laborious life. Inva-
sions by pagans, and his constantly recurring and
disabling bodily pain, did not prevent his carrying
on the government with vigour. And he was full
of other occupations. Hunting in all its branches
he continued to practise. He taught his workers
of gold, 2 one of whom no doubt had made in the

1 Nothing is said of her training in needlework. The skill of the Saxon
ladies was great. There is contemporary evidence of this in the tapestry-
work figures of the stole of Frithestan, now in the Chapter Library at
Durham, worked under the direction of Alfred's daughter-in-law ./Elflaed,
between 910 and 915. A Latin inscription states that JElflted ordered it to be
made for the pious Bishop Frithestan. The most gorgeous cope seen by Anselm
at the Council of Bari in 1098 had been a Canterbury vestment in Canute's
time.

2 Frithestan's stole is a wonderful example of weaving in gold-wire, beaten
flat like narrow tape. It is woven with selvedged openings for the insertion
of the prophets, etc., these figures being made in tapestry-work.

As Religious Man and Educationalist 89

earlier years of his reign the ornament of gold and
enamel found at Athelney in 1693 and now in the
Bodleian, with its legend speaking of his personal
care, Alfred had me made. He trained artificers
of all kinds ; he trained his falconers, hawkers, and
kennel-men. By his own mechanical inventions
he was able to build houses beyond all precedent of
his ancestors. He learned by heart the Saxon
poems and made others learn them ; he recited
Saxon books ; he alone never desisted from study-
ing most diligently to the best of his ability. He
attended mass and the other daily religious ser-
vices ; he was frequent in singing psalms and in
prayer, at the day hours and the night hours ; he
went to the churches at night to pray secretly,
unknown to his courtiers. He was in the habit of
hearing the Divine Scriptures read by his own
countrymen, or, if it so happened, in the company
of foreigners. His bishops, too, and all ecclesias-
tics, his earls and nobles, his officers and friends,
were loved by him with wonderful affection ; their
sons who were bred up in the royal household
were as dear to him as his own ; he had them
instructed in all good morals, and never ceased to
teach them letters day and night. And yet he
complained to God, and to all who were admitted
to intimacy with him, that the Almighty had made
him ignorant of divine wisdom and of the liberal
arts. He was affable and pleasant to all that, we

90 King Alfred

may depend upon it, was the truth, and not that
other story of morose repulse of all who sought
him and he was curiously eager to investigate
things unknown.

Determined to advance learning in his kingdom
of Wessex, he invited out of Mercia four very
learned men of that nation. They were Werefrith,
Bishop of Worcester, who translated the dialogues
of Gregory and Peter into Saxon ; Plegmund,
afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, the founder
of the Saxon Chronicle ; and the priests Ethel-
stan and Werewulf. Night and day, when-
ever there was leisure, one of these four read to
him ; so that he possessed a knowledge of every
book, though as yet he could not himself read his
books.

Further, he sent to Gaul for teachers, and two
especially are named. These were Grimbald, the
provost of St. Omer, a good singer, prominent
in ecclesiastical discipline and good morals,
very learned in Holy Scripture, and John of
Corbey, learned in all kinds of literature and
skilled in many arts. Asser, who was of the
greatest service to him, he persuaded to come to
him out of South Wales ; Asser's own account of
the bargaining is very quaint. Asser's principal
function was, as we have seen in the case of the four
Mercians, to read to him night and day whenever
there was time. Alfred carried his determination

As Religious Man and Educationalist 9 1

to have learned men in important places so far
that he would rather keep a bishopric vacant than
fill it with an unlearned man. That he had the
income of vacant bishoprics has been made a charge
against him. An examination of the dates of
death of bishops in Alfred's dominions and the
dates of consecration of their successors fails to
provide any serious ground for a charge of this
kind.

The story of Alfred's invention of candles to
measure the time is well known. It is not so well
known that his desire to measure time correctly
came from a religious motive. His determination
was to give to God half his time, day and night.
So far as the day was concerned, if the sun was
visible the division could be made ; but clouds by
day baffled him, and at night there was darkness.
Hence the invention of the candles, which were
measured to burn four hours each. Each candle
was divided into twelve equal parts by lines on the
surface. The invention of a lantern followed, for
a reason which sets before us the discomforts of
life in those times. The candles did not burn
steadily and evenly, for the flame was blown about
by the violence of the wind, which blew day and
night without intermission through the doors and
windows of the churches, the fissures of the divi-
sions, the plankings, the walls, or the sides of the
tents. Alfred made boxes for the lights, with

92 King Alfred

doors of white ox-horn planed so thin that
they were like glass. There are small niches in
some of our churches now, with signs of doors,
probably for protecting the lights at night from
the draught.

And as he gave half of his time to God, so he
gave half of his income. Ethelwulf, his father,
had released from tribute to the king one-tenth
part of the royal estates, 1 for the glory of God and
his own eternal salvation. Alfred divided his
income into two equal parts, for secular and for
ecclesiastical expenditure. The secular half was
divided into three equal parts. The first was for
his soldiers and the nobles who attended at his
court and performed divers functions ; these latter
were in three sets, each of which performed one
month's service in each quarter and spent two
months at home. The next third went to the
operatives whom he had collected from every
nation, of great skill in every kind of construction ;
workers in gold are specially mentioned in another
part of Asser's description. The remaining third
went to foreigners who visited him, whether they
asked for money or not. So much for the secular
half of his income.

The second half of each year's income was
all given to God. It was divided into four
parts. The first part was for the poor of all

1 This is variously stated.

As Religious Man and Educationalist 93

nations. 1 It was to be discreetly bestowed ; for the
king said that, as far as could be, Pope Gregory's
saying should be fulfilled, give not much to whom
you should give little, nor little to whom much, nor
something to whom nothing, nor nothing to whom
something. The second was for the two monas-
teries which Alfred had specially founded, at
Athelney and Shaftesbury. The third went to his
school, which he had studiously collected together,
of many of the nobility of his own kingdom. The
fourth was for all the neighbouring monasteries in
all Saxony and Mercia, and in some years for
monasteries in Wales, Cornwall, Gaul, Brittany,
Northumbria, and sometimes Ireland. It is a
remarkable fact that in this large expenditure for
religious purposes, the purposes are at most only
indirectly connected with the definitely spiritual
work of ministering the Word of God and the
Sacraments to the people at large.

Asser is not very clear in the sequence of his
ideas. But we gather that the king's desire to
found monasteries was due to his own fixed pur-
pose of holy meditation, to which he desired to
invite others. But he could not find any one of
his own nation, free by birth, who was willing to
adopt the monastic life, except some who were

1 Here as elsewhere we may suppose that the various races in these islands
are meant. The list of countries given under the fourth head is probably a
sufficient guide to the meaning of the phrase.

94 King Alfred

mere children, too young to choose between good
and evil. The love of the monastic life, once so
strong in England, had died out. Asser theorises
as to the reasons for this, and he produces two
which seem to be mutually destructive : it was
either because of the constant invasions by sea and
land, or because people abounded in riches of every
kind and so despised the monastic life. He had
to get an old Saxon to act as Abbot of his new
foundation of Athelney ; and then some priests
and deacons from across the seas ; and then, as he
had not nearly plenty of inmates, he got as many
Gauls as he possibly could, including children, to
be reared to the monastic life. Asser had himself
seen a lad of pagan birth who was educated there,
and who was by no means the hindmost of them
all.

The formation of King Alfred's Manual, which
is not known to exist, may best be told something
as Asser tells it. He says that it was in 887 or
888 that the king first formed the desire to inter-
pret passages of Scripture to those who did not
know Latin.

" We were talking together one day, and I read
to him an extract from a certain book. He heard
it with both his ears. He brought out his book
with the daily courses and psalms and the prayers
he had read in his youth, and commanded me to
write there the quotation. I turned it over, and

As Religious Man and 'Educationalist 95

found it very nearly full. After some delay I
said, had I not better find another sheet on which
this might be entered apart ; for perhaps some
other quotation might occur, and if so we should
be glad to have them kept together ? * Your plan
is good,' he said. So I made haste and got a sheet
and wrote the quotation. That same day no less
than three other passages pleased him ; and from
that time we talked daily and wrote such things as
pleased him till at last it was full, for he went on
unceasingly collecting many flowers of Divine
Scriptures. When the first quotation was copied
onto the sheet, he at once became anxious to read
and interpret it in Saxon, and to teach others.
The book grew till it became almost as large as a
Psalter. He called it his Manual, because he kept
it carefully at hand day and night, and found, as
he told me, no small consolation therein."

It was not to Rome only that Alfred sent mes-
sengers and gifts. Asser speaks, with Celtic
breadth, of daily embassies sent to foreign nations,
from the Tyrrhenian sea to the farthest end of
Ireland. 1 The English Chronicle goes further.
Alfred vowed, it is said, when they were set against

1 A mediaeval editor proposes to read Hiberiae instead of Hiberniae, Spain
instead of Ireland. But the English Chronicle tells of a visit to Alfred in
891 of three Scots, that is, Irishmen, smitten with the desire to wander. A
later Chronicle assigns their departure from their own land to the death of
their favourite teacher Swifneh. He was known as the most wise, or most
skilled, of the Scots, and the English Chronicle mentions his death. His

96 King Alfred

the enemy in London, to send embassies to St.
Thomas and St. Bartholomew. The Chronicle,
under the year 883, tells us that he sent gifts to
India. William of Malmesbury informs us that
Sigelm, Bishop of Sherborne, was sent as ambas-
sador with the gifts to St. Thomas, and that he
prosperously penetrated into India. Thus, Dean
Hook remarks, the first intercourse between Eng-
land and Hindustan consisted of this interchange
of Christian feeling. It is, however, a little curious
that Asser never mentions India, nor did Alfred
interpolate any mention of his embassy when trans-
lating Orosius for his English people. Asser
definitely mentions Judea, telling us that he had
seen letters to Alfred which came with presents
from Abel the Patriarch of Jerusalem. It may be
worth mention that other MSS. of the English
Chronicle read ludia and ludea instead of India.
Still, the fact of the journey of Alfred's messengers
to some distant part which then bore the name of
India, seems to be accepted on all hands. There
is no very violent improbability about it. Chris-
tian missionaries from Persia had reached India
and China more than three centuries before this,
two of them bringing the silk-worm to the Greek
empire in Justinian's reign, about 550. The

beautiful Celtic grave slab is at Clonmacnoise. The close connection which
existed between the early Anglo-Saxons and the Irish schools of learning had
now ceased.

As Religious Man and Educationalist 97

Egyptian merchant - monk Cosmas wrote his
Christian Topography at that date. He found
Nestorian Christians in Ceylon and Malabar,
but the king and people of Ceylon were still
heathens.

Alfred's Ecclesiastical Laws have a long preface,
apparently prepared by himself. It is an interest-
ing piece of argument. First he gives the Ten
Commandments in Saxon. Writers inform us that
he omits the Second Commandment, in accord-
ance with the evil practice which had already made
considerable progress then ; but probably these
writers did not read to the end, for Alfred's Tenth
Commandment is, " Thou shalt not make to thyself
golden gods nor silvern." Then he points out that
our Saviour, Christ, said He came not to break
nor forbid these Commandments, but with all good
to increase them, and mercy and humility He taught.
Then he quotes the decisions of the church at
Jerusalem as to the tenderness of the application
of the law to the Gentile converts. When the
English race became Christian, he proceeds, they
held synods of holy bishops and great and wise
men. They then ordained, out of that mercy
which Christ had taught, that secular lords, by
the synod's leave, might without sin take for
almost every misdeed, for the first offence, the
money fine ordained by the synod. They then
in many synods ordained a fine for many human

7

98 King Alfred

misdeeds, and in many synod-books they wrote, at
one place one doom, at another another.

The one offence to which they dared not assign
any mercy, that is, any hot, or money fine, was
treason to a lord ; because God Almighty adjudged
no mercy to those who despised Him, nor did
Christ, the Son of God, adjudge any to him who
sold Him to death, and He commanded that a
lord should be loved as -Himself.

This is a very interesting explanation of the
Saxon system of money payments for offences of
almost every description. It is not altogether
unlike in principle to the modern magistrate-law
that a dog has his first bite free. That application
of the principle found no favour with King Alfred,
in whose days dogs were great and dangerous
beasts. If a dog tear or bite a man, for the first
misdeed, 6s. ; for the second, I2s. ; for the third,
303. If the dog do more misdeeds, the owner is
to go on paying, or must repudiate the dog.

" These many dooms I, Alfred the king, gathered
together ; and commanded many to be written of
those our forefathers held which to me seemed
good ; and many of those which seemed to me
not good, I rejected them by the counsel of my
wise men. I durst not venture to set down much
of my own, for it was unknown to me what of it
would please those who should come after us."

Three characteristic dooms may be quoted.

As Religious Man and Educationalist 99

" He who steals on Sunday, or at Christmas or
Easter, or on Holy Thursday, 1 or on Rogation
days, 2 or during Lent, shall pay a twofold hot."
u If a man go to the church, and reveal an offence
not revealed, and confess himself in God's name,
be it half forgiven." For holidays, " To all free-
men, 1 2 days at Yule, and the day on which Christ
overcame the devil, and the commemoration day
of St. Gregory, and 7 days before Easter and
7 after, and one day at St. Peter's tide, and
one day at St. Paul's tide, and in harvest the
whole week before St. Mary-mass, and one day at
the celebration of All Hallows, and the 4
Wednesdays in Ember weeks," forty-two days in
all, making, with the addition of Sundays, just a
quarter of the whole year.

1 We have lost the sense of paganism in the names of our days, but it
conies out quaintly in the Saxon form, on thone Halgan Thunres doeg.

2 Still called in Yorkshire, as in Alfred's Ecclesiastical Law, gang-days.

Ill

HIS TRANSLATIONS AND HIS WILL

His translations Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English
Race The Pastoral Care State of learning in Wessex,
Mercia, and Northumbria Ideal of a bishop's life
Orosius Boethius Alfred's religious opinions John
the Scot Alfred's will Hyde Abbey State of Rome
Religious references Religious bequests Slaves.

^ fiMx HE general drift of Alfred's opinion as
^^P^^ to the sort of learning most needed
by his people is to be gathered from
his choice of books to be put before
them in their native language. These were four.
For general history, and for history and geography
relating to their own race on the continent of
Europe, he chose Orosius : for mental study, the
Consolation of Boethius : for realisation of the
true principles of the life and work of religion,
the Pastoral Care : for the Church history of
the English people, of course the great and price-
less book of the Venerable Bede. Of this last we
need say nothing. Nor need we dwell upon the

CAMPBELL
COLLECTION

As Religious Man and "Educationalist i o i

fact that Alfred may be said to have created the
continuity of early English history by his establish-
ment of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under Pleg-
mund.

The preface to Alfred's translation into English
from the Latin of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care,
a treatise on the life and work of a bishop, gives
us so clear an insight into the king's mind, and
such valuable information as to the state of learn-
ing in his time, that it deserves to be printed in
full. Three of the copies of which the king
speaks are in existence, one addressed to Arch-
bishop Plegmund of Canterbury, one to Bishop
Wulfsige of Sherborne, and the third to Bishop
Werefrith of Worcester.

THIS BOOK is FOR WORCESTER

King Alfred greets Bishop Wasrferth with loving
words and with friendship. I let it be known to thee
that it has very often come into my mind, what wise men
there formerly were throughout England, both of sacred
and secular orders ; and how happy times there were then
throughout England ; and how the kings who had power
over the nation in those days obeyed God and his minis-
ters ; and they preserved peace, morality, and order at
home, and at the same time enlarged their territory
abroad ; and how they prospered both with war and with
wisdom j and also the sacred orders how zealous they
were both in teaching and learning, and in all the services
they owed to God ; and how foreigners came to this land

IO2 King Alfred

in search of wisdom and instruction, and how we should
now have to get teachers from abroad if we were to have
them. So general was the decay in England that there
were very few on this side of the Hum her who could under-
stand their rituals in English, or translate a letter from
Latin into English ; and I believe that there were not
many beyond the Humber. There were so few of them
that I cannot remember a single one south of the Thames
when I came to the throne. Thanks be to God Almighty
that we have any teachers among us now. And there-
fore I command thee to do as I believe thou art willing,
to disengage thyself from worldly matters as often as may
be, that thou mayest apply the wisdom which God has
given thee wherever thou canst. 1 Consider what punish-
ments would come upon us on account of this world, if
we neither loved wisdom ourselves nor suffered other men
to obtain it : we should love the name only of Christian,
and very few of the virtues. When I considered all this
I remembered also how I saw in my own early days, be-
fore all had been ravaged and burnt, how the churches
throughout the whole of England stood filled with
treasures and books, and there was also a great multitude
of God's servants. But they had very little knowledge
of the books, for they could not understand anything of
them because they were not written in their own
language. As if they had said : "Our forefathers, who
formerly held these places, loved wisdom, and through
it they obtained wealth and bequeathed it to us. In this
we can still see their tracks, but we cannot follow them,

1 Even of the famous scholar Aldhelm, 200 years before, it was said that
when he became bishop he was absorbed, as the manner of bishops was, in
the secular cares of his position.

As Religious Man and Educationalist 103

and therefore we have lost both the wealth and the
wisdom, because we would not incline our hearts after
their example." When I remembered all this, I won-
dered extremely that the good and wise men who were
formerly all over England, and had perfectly learnt all the
books, did not wish to translate them into their own lan-
guage. But again I soon answered myself and said :
They did not think that men would ever be so careless,
and that learning would thus decay ; so they abstained
from translating, and they hoped that wisdom in this land
would increase, and our knowledge of languages. Then
I remembered how the law was first known in Hebrew,
and again, when the Greeks had learnt it, they translated
the whole of it into their own language, and all other
books besides. And again, the Romans, when they had
learnt it, they translated the whole of it through learned
interpreters into their own language. And also all other
Christian nations translated parts of it into their own
languages. Therefore it seems better to me, if ye think
so, for us also to translate some books which are most
needful for all men to know into the language which we can
all understand. And I would have you do as we very easily
can if we have tranquillity enough, that is, set all the
youth now in England of free men, who are rich enough
to be able to devote themselves to it, to learn, as long as
they are not old enough for other occupations, until they
are well able to read English writing. And let those be
afterwards taught more in the Latin language who are
to continue learning and be promoted to a higher rank.
When I remembered how the knowledge of Latin had
formerly decayed throughout England, and yet many
could read English writing, I began, among other various
and manifold troubles of this kingdom, to translate into

1 04 King Alfred

English the book which is called in Latin Pastoralis^
and in English Shepherd's Book, sometimes word for word
and sometimes according to the sense, as I had learnt it
from Plegmund my archbishop, and Asser my bishop,
and Grimbold my mass -priest, and John my mass-
priest. 1 And when I had learnt it as I could best under-
stand it and as I could most clearly interpret it, I translated
it into English ; and I will send a copy to every bishopric
in my kingdom ; and on each there is a [clasp and chain] 2
worth fifty mancuses. And I command in God's name
that no man take the [clasp] from the book or the book
from the minster. It is uncertain how long there may
be such learned bishops as, thanks be to God, there now
are nearly everywhere ; therefore I wish these books
always to remain in their place, unless the bishop wish to
take them with him, or they be lent out anywhere, or
any one make a copy from them.

Then the book itself is made to speak, as the
Cross speaks in the early Anglian Dream of the
Holy Rood :

This message Augustine over the salt sea brought
from the south to the islanders, as the Lord's champion
had formerly indited it, the Pope of Rome. The wise
Gregorius was versed in many true doctrines through the
wisdom of his mind, his hoard of studious thoughts. For
he gained over most of mankind to the Guardian of

1 His translation of this book is much closer to the original than is the
case with his History (Becle), Geography (Orosius), and Philosophy
(Boethius).

2 Perhaps a desk and pointer. See Professor Earle's remarks in this
volume.

APRIL

MAY

THE SEASONS APRIL TO JUNE

(Cot Ionian Library]

As Religious Man and Educationalist 105

heaven, best of Romans, wisest of men, most gloriously
famous. Afterwards King Alfred brought every word
of me into English, and sent me to his scribes south and
north ; ordered more such to be brought to him, that he
might send them to his bishops, for some of them needed
it, who knew but little Latin.

It is not our business here to consider the
contents of Pope Gregory's treatise on the shep-
herding of the people. But the headings of
two or three of the sixty-five chapters will show
what the attraction for Alfred's mind was. The
first chapter argues " that unlearned men are not
to presume to undertake teaching." To prevent
this was a purpose with Alfred ; he faced obloquy,
it is said, rather than fill bishoprics with un-
learned men. The second chapter forbids even
learned men to undertake to teach if they are not
ready to live in accordance with their own precepts.
The third and fourth chapters no doubt appealed
to himself as a secular governor, though they
related to spiritual government, "how he who
governs must despise all hardships, and how afraid
he must be of every luxury," and " how often the
occupations of power and government distract the
mind of the ruler." The sixty-fifth chapter brings
the whole to a conclusion with an argument
thoroughly after Alfred's own heart : " When any
one has performed all the duties of his pastoral
charge, let him then consider and understand his

106 King Alfred

own self, lest either his exemplary life or his
successful teaching puff him up."

In his translation of the history and geography
of Orosius he does not interpolate information
where we might not unnaturally have expected
him to do so. Of his large and valuable interpo-
lations of a geographical character, and in regard
to the history of the Teutonic races, mention is
no doubt made in another chapter. In the sixth
book, to mention two cases where Orosius writes
of the times of Constantius and Constantine, and
makes references to Britain, he does not speak of
Christianity here, and Alfred does not add any-
thing. Orosius speaks of many martyrs under
Diocletian, not localising any. Again, Alfred does
not add anything. Two quaint phrases the king
employs : " In those days Arius the mass-priest
was in error with regard to the right faith " ;
" Constantine was the first emperor who ordered
churches to be built, and locked up the devil's
houses."

It is not to be wondered at that Alfred deter-
mined to translate into English the Consolation
of Boethius, and his interpolations show how dear
the book was to his heart and to his reason. King
and people alike had gone through much trial and
suffering, and such happiness and prosperity as
they had was at best very precarious. The book
of Consolation which Boethius wrote in the sad

A s Religious Man and Educationalist 1 07

days when all his great prosperity had passed from
him, and he waited in chains for the last fatal word
of the tyrant, was well suited for men and women
situated as the English then were. Boethius
himself, who was executed in 524, was both a very
learned Christian and a deeply -read student of
classical philosophy. His Consolations are taken
entirely from philosophy, but they have the Chris-
tian spirit. They thus supplement the help which
the Christian religion gives to those in anxiety, and
put into the troubled mind fresh and useful trains
of thought. This is probably one main reason for
the attraction which the book had in the Middle
Ages, and we cannot doubt that Alfred had this in
view in giving it to his people. Why he did not
at the same time have the New Testament trans-
lated into English is not clear, for he himself
pointed out, in his Preface to the Pastoral Care,
that the law was first given in Hebrew, and then
necessarily translated into Greek, and Latin, and
the languages of the various nations which em-
braced Christianity. William of Malmesbury tells
us that the king did as a matter of fact set about
translating the Psalter, but died before the first
part was done.

Besides the hint which his translation of Boe-
thius gives, it is on another account probable that
Alfred took a broad view of religious questions.
If the evidence is to be accepted as sufficient,

io8 King Alfred

he was a patron of Johannes Scotus Erigena.
John the Scot, that is, as we should now say, the
Irishman, had made the Continent too hot to hold
him by the breadth of his religious views. He
refused to distinguish religion from philosophy, an
attitude of mind which may have specially influ-
enced Alfred, who had probably known him as a
boy at the court of Charles the Bald, where John
acted as tutor to Judith. He had maintained, too,
that authority, when it is not confirmed by reason,
is of no value. He had made a determined stand
against the new and materialistic teaching on the
Real Presence, known as transubstantiation. He
found a refuge at the court of Alfred. This can
scarcely have meant less than that Alfred, to some
extent at least, shared his opinions ; and if that was
so, we see an additional reason for Alfred's admira-
tion of Boethius, and we have some explanation of
the character of the provisions of the will by which
the king disposed of his property.

In those days, and in days earlier still, to teach
an unpopular opinion was a dangerous thing. Great
violence was not unknown in schools of learning.
Even in modern times we hear a good deal of the
violence of students in Paris and in other univer-
sities of the Continent. When Archbishop Theo-
dore came over to England in 664 and began to
teach, there were very sharp passages at arms
between the teacher and the Irish students who

As Religious Man and Educationalist 1 09

attended his lectures. Aldhelm was a student at
Canterbury at the time, and he describes one of
these encounters, where the Irish students baited
their lecturer, Archbishop though he was. The
old student and lecturer of the University of
Athens was more than a match for them. " He
treated them," Aldhelm wrote to a friend, " as the
truculent boar treats the Molossian hounds. He
tore them with the tusk of grammar, and shot them
with the deep and sharp syllogisms of chronography,
till they cast away their weapons and hurriedly
fled to the recesses of their dens." In Wessex the
students went further still. One John almost
certainly not the famous John of whom we are
speaking, though mediaeval writers took him to be
the same so irritated the students of the great
school of Malmesbury, that they set on him with
the sharp iron styles of the time, which represented
our modern pens, and inflicted wounds of which he
died. William of Malmesbury gives the epitaph
of this John from a tomb on the left side of the
altar at Malmesbury ; he is described as the holy
sophist John, and is said to have been a martyr.
William does not absolutely identify him with
Johannes Erigena, but he describes him as Johannes
Scottus, and says that he had been at the court of
Charles the Bald, and was attracted by the muni-
ficence of Alfred. We may fairly say that William
believed their John to be the Erigena, and we may

1 1 o King Alfred

almost certainly say that in that belief he was
wrong.

John the Erin-born is usually said to have died
about 886. There is thus no difficulty on the
score of dates in the way of his being at Alfred's
court. He must have been an oldish man, for
he was a prominent controversialist as early as
854.

Alfred's will is on all accounts a document of
very great interest. We have noticed already the
provisions of his father's will, so far as they have
been preserved for us, and with these we cannot
but contrast the corresponding parts of Alfred's
disposition of his property. Many details of the
will we must for our present purpose pass by,
notwithstanding their general importance : they
are no doubt dealt with in another chapter.

Alfred's will exists in an Anglo-Saxon form and
in a Latin form. It is preserved in the Register
of Newminster, which Alfred founded at Win-
chester. This institution was afterwards moved
to Hyde. The will was copied into the Register
now known as the Register of Hyde Abbey, about
the years 1028-1032.

Ethelwulf had bequeathed considerable sums to
the Church of St. Peter and the Church of St. Paul
at Rome, and to the Pope. Alfred had sent
presents to Rome. From 883 to 890 there are four
records of West Saxon gifts. But after 890 there

A s Religious Man and Educationalist 1 1 1

is no record, and in Alfred's will no mention is
made of the chief city of the Western world or of
the spiritual head of the Church of the West. One
explanation may be that at his death the sad period
had already begun which makes men of all Christian
creeds hang their heads with shame that such things
could be. King Alfred's court was unique among
secular courts in its purity and order ; the papal
court had entered upon one of those phases in its
existence where it has stood out prominently among
the most impure and disorderly spots on the face
of the known earth. It is enough, for any one
who knows the meaning of the references, to glance
at the table of contents of a Church history for the
years 896 and 897 : "Death of Pope Formosus ;
Pope Boniface VII. ; trial and condemnation of
the body of Formosus by Pope Stephen VI. ;
Pope Stephen strangled ; Pope Romanus ; Pope
Theodorus II. ; Pope John IX. ; Pope Sergius
IV. ; Marquisate of Tusculum ; Theodora and
Marozia." We can well understand that not all
Alfred's reverence for the place where lay the
bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul could overcome
the effect of a record so grievous as that.

Turning to those parts of Alfred's will which
have a directly religious bearing, it is impossible
not to be struck by the obliqueness of the religious
references. Of his reliance on divine help and his
trust in divine assistance there is no doubt. He

112 King Alfred

clearly regarded these as powers actually at work
in the world, and as the one only means by which
the actions of those who should follow him might
be rightly guided. It is by God's support that he
trusts his will may be carried out. He is king
by God's grace. He has considered of his soul's
health, and of the inheritance which God and his
ancestors did give ; but he is reserved and allusive
where other men of the time were detailed and
definite. The air of reserve would almost seem to
indicate that the teaching of John the Erin-born,
while it had not in the least shaken the confidence
of his faith and trust, had seriously indisposed him
to speak in confident detail of the relations of
man's service to God's help. " Let them distribute,
for me and for my father and for the friends that
he interceded for and I intercede for, 200 pounds ;
50 to the mass-priests all over my kingdom, 50 to
the poor servants of God, 50 to the distressed
poor, 50 to the church where I shall rest." " And
I will that they do restore to the families at
Domersham their land-deeds and their liberty to
choose any man they will [i.e. to continue to live
under that lord or to choose another], for me and
for ^Iflaed [his eldest daughter] and for the friends
that she did intercede for and I do intercede for."
" And Jet them also seek with a living price * for

1 The words in the Saxon will are sec man eac on cwicum ceape , in the
Latin will, imploretur deus wventi fretio.

As Religious Man and 'Educationalist 1 1 3

my soul's health so far as may be * and as is fitting
and as ye to give me shall be disposed." It has
been clearly shown that on cwicum ceape was a
recognised phrase for "with live stock." The
reserve of Alfred's language in this, the most im-
portant part of his will in mediaeval opinion, is
worthy of note. Indeed, the absence of definite
words which might have been expected is
so marked that in another Latin copy, a very
incorrect translation of part of the Anglo-
Saxon will, they are added, but curiously
enough are connected solely with the restora-
tion of the land-books to the people at Domer-
sham. The freeing of slaves was a religious
work. It will be seen that as a religious work
Alfred himself regarded it. " I beseech in God's
name and in the name of His Saints that no one
of my relations or heirs obstruct the freedom of
those whom I have redeemed. The West-Saxon
Witan have pronounced it lawful that I may leave
them free or bond as I will. But I, for God's love
and for my soul's advantage, will that they be
master of their freedom and of their will ; and in
the name of the living God I bid that none dis-
turb them, neither by money exaction nor by any
manner of means."

It is a well-known fact that the Church set
before men the duty of giving slaves their freedom.

1 Saxon, tiva hit beon maege ; Latin, quantum fieri foait.

1 1 4 King Alfred

Late in the seventh century, Bishop Wilfrith
released 250 men and women whom he found
attached as slaves to his estate of Selsey ; and
Archbishop Theodore denied Christian burial to
the kidnapper, and prohibited the sale of children
by their parents after the age of seven. In the
year 816, the archbishop and bishops of the
southern province, thirteen in number, met in
council at Celchyth (Chelsea), and bound them-
selves by canon to free at their death every
Englishman, who, during their tenure of the lands
of the bishoprics, had become a slave, the usual
causes of enslavement in time of peace being
poverty or crime. There is a canon of that
council, directed against the abstraction of monas-
tic charters and lists of landed property, which has
a very modern sound about its title, " that monas-
teries be not deprived of their telligraphs."

We cannot close this chapter better than with
Alfred's own right royal words. " I can assert
this in all truth, that during the whole course of
my existence I have always striven to live in a
becoming manner, and at my death to leave to those
who follow me a worthy memorial in my works."

ALFRED AS WARRIOR

F all the aspects of Alfred's many-sided
life there is none more interesting,
yet more baffling, than his military
career. We know its outlines : his
lot fell in the direst time of storm and stress that
had ever come upon the English ; he weathered
the tempest which had so sorely buffeted his father
and his brothers, and steered the ship of the state
into calmer waters. We have a not inconsider-
able bulk of records concerning his campaigns,
yet again and again the why and the wherefore of
triumph and defeat elude us. The all-important
details which would explain why things went ill in
872 and well in 878, why Basing saw a disaster and
Buttington a victory, are withheld. The un-
wearied king marches east and marches west, now
with a large army, now with a mere handful of
men ; he reaches his foes and brings them to bay ;
then " the heathen are put to flight," or, on the
other hand, " after great slaughter on both sides
the Danes hold possession of the place of battle " ;

1 1 8 King Alfred

but whether superior tactics, or superior numbers,
or superior endurance won the day is concealed
from us. It is seldom that even the most vague
and general features of the fight are narrated : of
really important engagements like Ashdown or
Eddington, or the struggle on the Lea, we know
only just enough to make us desire to know
more.

Fortunately we are able to make out a good
deal more about the strategy than about the tactics
of Alfred's campaigns. His itineraries are gener-
ally preserved, and the natural features of hill and
vale and marsh and wood can easily be ascertained.
Similarly there is a certain amount to be recovered
concerning his work as a military organiser, though
here our authorities give us hints rather than facts,
and make it very hard to disentangle his reforms
from those of his worthy successor, Edward the
Elder.

When Alfred first looked upon the face of war,
the English had been already engaged for some
seventy years in their great struggle to drive off
the Vikings, and were prospering little in the at-
tempt. The period during which the invaders
had contented themselves with sporadic descents on
the towns and monasteries hard by the sea, was
long over. They were now cutting their way deep
into England from every side, and prolonging
their stay more and more every year. While Alfred

A s Warrior 1 1 9

was still a child by his mother's knee, a yet more
threatening stage had been reached : instead of
returning to their homes by the Danish and Nor-
wegian fiords, when autumn drew to an end, the
enemy had begun to fortify some ness or island by
the English shore, and to abide there all the winter
months. The period of objectless plunder was
drawing near its end, and that of settlement and
conquest was approaching.

It is not hard to make out the main causes of
the ineffectiveness of the resistance which the Eng-
lish kingdoms offered to the invader ; they were
much the same as those which were to be seen in
the Prankish empire on the other side of the British
Channel the want of any central organisation for
combined defence the want of any large bodies
of professional fighting-men, fully equipped with
the best arms of the day the scarcity of fortified
places the non-existence of a war -fleet. In
respect of the first of these matters the English
were in some ways more unfortunate, in others
happier, than the Franks. On the Continent the
Vikings were confronted by a vast empire which
was beginning to drop to pieces from its own
weight ; the realm of Charlemagne would have
split up into national kingdoms even if there had
been no invaders from outside to hasten the
process. Particularism and heritage - partition
were the order of the day it was impossible to

1 20 King Alfred

hope that the numerous descendants of the great
Carling house would loyally aid each other against
the external enemy, or that their heterogeneous
subjects would care much for the woes of their
neighbours. In England, on the other hand,
the national evolution of the times was tending
towards union. Even before the effects of the
Danish invasions began to be felt, the states of the
Heptarchy were already beginning to draw together
into larger units. Offa the Mercian (755-794)
had been suzerain of all England in a far truer
sense than any of the early " Bretwalda " kings
that were before him. He had annexed kingdoms
like Kent, Essex, East Anglia, instead of merely
making their monarchs do him homage. These
states rose again for a short space at his death;
but when Egbert won the supremacy for Wessex a
few years later, the same tendency was apparent :
that great warrior was able to incorporate the old
realms of Kent and Sussex with his ancestral
dominions, nor did they ever again free themselves
from dependence on the house of Cerdic. It was
clear that England was tending to group itself into
no more than three or four large states : the smaller
tribal nationalities were beginning to be absorbed
in the greater. Thus, though Egbert and his suc-
cessor Ethelwulf were kings south of Thames alone,
and only enjoyed a precarious suzerainty north of
it, yet there was some hope for the future. The

As Warrior 121

fatal disruptive tendencies visible among the Franks
were not paralleled on this side of the Channel.

In the second point wherein the old Christian
kingdoms were at a disadvantage when struggling
with the Dane the want of a large and well-armed
body of trained fighting-men England was pro-
bably .in a worse condition than her continental
neighbour. Both possessed two classes of warriors
a small body of wealthy landed vassals of the
king, bound to him by special oaths of allegiance,
and the general levy of the country-side, torn from
the plough when necessity demanded. The former
were more or less professional warriors : the Eng-
lish " gfsithcund m&n holding land," if he neglected
his lord's summons to join the host, forfeited his
estate and paid a crushing fine as well : the ordinary
peasant, the "ceorlish man," only suffered pecuniary
punishment for the same offence. The gesiths, or
thegns, as they were now beginning to be called,
a wealthy, well-armoured military class, were the
core of the national host. The rude masses of the
half-armed country folk were a far less efficient
part of the military forces of the realm. But in
England the thegnhood does not appear in the
ninth century to have reached nearly the same stage
of relative importance as had the Prankish vassals.
They would seem to have been less numerous in
proportion to the size of the states, and less power-
ful in the realm. As a combatant body, too, they

122 King Alfred

were inferior, for the Franks had taken to fighting
on horseback, and every vassal came to the host
not only well armed, but well mounted. The
English were still fighting on foot like their an-
cestors : they did not, indeed, learn cavalry service
till the eleventh century. In contending with an
active and rapidly moving enemy like the Dane,
this want of horsemen was a terrible drawback to
the English host.

The third source of weakness which we have
named the scarcity of well-fortified strongholds
was felt both on this and on the other side of the
Channel. Neither Frank nor Anglo-Saxon had
made any systematic attempt to keep up the great
fortresses which they had inherited from the
Romans. But here again the English were at a
greater disadvantage than their continental neigh-
bours. They had neglected scientific fortification
even more than the Franks. They mostly dwelt in
open towns and villages ; even the ancient Roman
walls of great cities like London and York had
been allowed to fall into decay. At most they
surrounded important positions with a ditch and a
stockade ; of the building of an actual wall we
hear only at one place, the Northumbrian capital
of Bamborough. The Franks, among whom city
life was far more important than in England, seem
to have done somewhat more in the way of keep-
ing up the old Roman enceintes of their great

As Warrior 123

towns. They had also taken of late to the build-
ing of strongholds destined to hold down conquered
territory. Charlemagne had warred down the
obstinate Saxons mainly by rearing line after line of
burgs among their heaths and forests. No great
English king had yet tried to maintain his control
over his vassal-states by such an expedient. Even
if the Prankish burgs were but concentric rings of
ditch, mound, and palisade, they were by no means
lacking in importance in the day of danger.

In the matter of naval defence, on the other
hand, there was more hope for England than for
her continental neighbours. The Saxons and
Angles had always been seafarers : the Franks had
never taken to the water. Neither of the nations
possessed any regular war-fleet, but in the one the
national genius was favourable to its creation ; in
the other it was not. We hear, indeed, long before
Alfred's day, of intermittent attempts of English
kings to do something on the seas. The most
notable was the assault on Ireland which the North-
umbrian Ecgfrith made in 684. In the days of
Alfred's own father, Ethelwulf, there was at least
one endeavour to meet the Danes upon the water :
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells how the Kentish
alderman Ealhere " fought in ships " at Sand-
wich, and took nine ships of the heathen, and
put the rest to flight" (851). It is possible that
the same chief was engaged in a second naval

1 24 King Alfred

battle two years later, for in an unsuccessful attempt
which he made to turn the Vikings out of Thanet
" there was much slaughter and many men drowned
upon both sides." Thanet being then separated
from the Kentish mainland by a broad estuary, it
is conceivable that there was some fighting on ship-
board on this occasion also.

But any small naval resources which England
possessed in the second half of the ninth century
seemed hopelessly inadequate to impose the least
check on the Danes. The invaders came in squad-
rons numbered by the hundred vessels. Even
after Alfred had begun to take in hand a scheme
for building a regular fleet, the English ships were
only counted in tens or scores. In our own days a
power possessing some few vessels, and expecting
invasion, would turn them to use by setting them
to watch for the enemy, discover him, and give
early knowledge of his approach, or to follow his
course and divine his intentions. But such tactics
demand vessels that can keep the sea for long
spaces of time and in any weather. Neither English
nor Danish galleys were suited for such work :
they preferred coasting voyages, and touched the
shore frequently, creeping from cape to cape and
from isle to isle. The only voyage across a broad
and open sea was that which was made when a
Viking fleet ran straight across from the south-
western cape of Norway instead of coasting along

As Warrior 125

the Danish and Frisian shore. The Scandinavians
were daring seamen, but their skill and pluck was
shown rather by the way in which they felt their
way along dangerous, rock-bound coasts, like those
of the Hebrides or Western Ireland, than by pass-
ages across the high seas. For such crossings
they waited for long spells of fine weather, in order
to run the least possible risk. This was only
natural, for their ships were but long, light, un-
decked vessels, depending mainly on their twelve
or sixteen oars a side, and only using their sails
when the wind set fair. To face a really serious
Atlantic storm they were wholly unfitted, and even
the rough weather of the Channel could be too
much for them. In 877 a whole fleet of a hundred
and twenty ships was wrecked near Swanage on
the cliffs of the Isle of Purbeck. It was no wonder
that they preferred to pick their weather, and to
hug the shore, in order that they might run into
the nearest haven when a tempest seemed at hand.
The seamanship of the English was undoubtedly
inferior to that of the Scandinavians in the ninth
century, and we may guess that in handiness as well
as in numbers they were wholly unable to vie with
their enemies before Alfred's day.

The years 840-880 were the darkest period in
the dismal century of the Viking raids. Neither
in England nor on the Continent had there been
found any effective way of resisting the invaders,

126 King Alfred

nor any great warrior who could inspire his sub-
ject with the energy and courage that was needed
to face the ever-growing evil. Kings like Ethel-
wulf or Charles the Bald, however good their in-
tentions, were wholly inadequate to the task.
Their warlike sons, Louis III., the victor of Sau-
court, and Ethelred, the victor of Ashdown, were
cut off in the prime of their years, just when they
were beginning to win themselves a name. The
Danes went where they would, no longer taking to
their ships when the national levy came out against
them, but stockading a camp and defying the
owners of the soil to evict them from it. Almost
always the assaults made on these strongholds
ended in disastrous failures : it is hard to say
whether the repulse of Charles the Bald at Givald's
Foss (852), of Ethelred at Reading (871), or of
Charles the Fat at Ashloh (882), was the more
heart-breaking to the landsfolk. It seemed im-
possible to burst through the bristling line of stakes
and ditch manned by the veteran axemen of the
heathen bands.

The fact was that the rank and file of the
Viking hosts were individually superior to the
peasant-levies that strove to overwhelm them. In
a Prankish or an English army only counts and
aldermen, thegns and wealthy vassals, wore the
steel helm and the ring-mail byrnie : the masses
that followed them to the field had no more than

As Warrior i 27

spear and shield, possessing no defensive armour
whatever. The Vikings, on the other hand, were
professional fighting-men, armed not only with the
" war-nets " that their own smiths could make, but
with the spoils of a hundred victorious fights. It
was no wonder that they could hold out against
very superior numbers of the raw, half -armed
militia of the English Fyrd and the Prankish Ban.
In the ages when personal skill with axe and sword
and trained agility of body counted for so much,
one practised warrior was worth two farmers fresh
from the plough. It required a vast preponder-
ance of force, or a very skilled and fortunate leader,
to enable the Christian host to inflict a really
crushing defeat on the invaders.

When Alfred was a child the problem seemed
growing more hopeless day by day. Even the
greatest cities of Western Christendom were falling
a prey to the heathen. London had been taken
and sacked in 851, Tours in 853, Paris in 857,
Winchester in 860. The invading hordes, now
carried in fleets of three or four hundred sail, came
ashore where they would, seized horses in the
country-side and rode across the land, plundering
far and wide, to some appointed spot to which their
fleet came round and joined them. Or they would
draw their ships ashore at some convenient estuary,
set a guard over them, and send the rest of the

D

host to make a circular raid, which finally took

128 King Alfred

them back to their camp and their vessels. The
former plan was the better, since if the ships ran
out to sea after throwing ashore the landing force,
the defenders of the realm did not know where the
march of the enemy would be directed ; while if
the fleet was immobilised on some ness or island,
it was easy to intercept the raiders, who were bound
to make their way back to their base.

The lowest pitch of despair seemed to be reached
when in many regions rulers and people ceased to
try to defend themselves against the Danes, and
merely strove to procure a precarious respite from
their oppressors by bribing them to depart and
transfer their ravages to other shores. This was
done in 865 by the Kentishmen, in 866 by the
East Angles, in 869 by the Mercians. Of course
the expedient was futile ; the news that one Viking
host had received a handsome tribute only drew
down another, set on obtaining similar booty.

Finally, there came the last step of all : not con-
tent with plunder and blackmail the invaders began
to think of taking up their permanent residence in
the land and making its unfortunate inhabitants
their subjects. The idea had already occurred to
Jarl Thorgils in Ireland, but his ephemeral king-
dom had disappeared at his murder. Now it was
renewed in England in 868, after the battle of
York, the most fearful disaster which had yet
befallen any of the Christian kingdoms. The

As Warrior 129

Danes had stormed the Northumbrian capital :
they had slain the two rival kings, Osbert and Ella,
who combined to attack them : all the thegnhood
of the northern realm had perished. Taking up
their quarters in the ancient city of Edwin and
Oswald, the conquerors began to parcel out the
neighbouring region among themselves as a per-
manent possession.

It was in the year after this terrible downfall of
the Northern Kingdom that Alfred made his first
campaign. He was now nineteen, and had just
married his Mercian bride, Ealhswith, the daughter
of Alderman Ethelred. The enterprise in which
he was engaged was one of a very typical character
a dozen expeditions with the same unfortunate
end could be cited from the English and Prankish
annals of the third quarter of the ninth century.
A large Viking host had entered Mercia and forced
its way up the Trent as far as Nottingham. King
Burgred sent to Wessex to beg the aid of his
brother-in-law Ethelred, who marched to his help,
taking his brother Alfred with him as second in
command. The united hosts of the two English
realms were too large for the Vikings to dare to
face them in the open field. They stockaded
themselves in a great camp on the banks of the
Trent and waited to be attacked. The landsfolk
laid siege to the stronghold, and strove to storm
it ; but they utterly failed to break their way in.

9

130 King Alfred

After lying some time before it, they dispersed in
despair : Ethelred and Alfred went home : the
unfortunate Burgred then asked for terms, and got
rid of the Vikings for a short space by paying them
a large tribute. The Danes returned to York, lay
there for one year, and then threw themselves
upon the East Angles. They slew King Edmund,
" the Martyr," scattered his army, sacked the
towns and monasteries of Norfolk and Suffolk,
and made themselves masters of the whole realm
(870).

Next year the turn of Wessex came : the Mer-
cians had at least bought two years of respite by
the treaty of Nottingham. Marching from East
Anglia the " Grand Army " of the Vikings crossed
the Thames, seized Reading, and stockaded a great
camp in the angle between the Kennet and the
Thames to serve as a base for their ravaging parties.
But in spite of a dozen disasters suffered during
the last forty years at the hands of the same enemy,
the spirit of Wessex was not yet quenched. Its
shire-levies loyally answered King Ethelred's call,
and gathered in great strength opposite the Danish
camp. The Berkshire fyrd even succeeded in bring-
ing to bay and destroying at Englefield a large
plundering party headed by a Jarl. But the main
body of the Vikings was not so easily disposed of.
A general attack on their stronghold, headed by
Ethelred and Alfred, proved wholly unfortunate.

As Warrior 131

When the assailants had wearied themselves in vain
attempts to hew their way through the stockade,
and drew off repulsed, the enemy made a sudden
sortie : " bursting out of the gates like wolves,"
they fell on the shattered ranks of the men of
Wessex, drove them away, and held possession of
the battle spot. Thinking apparently that the
English were disposed of so far as further fighting
was concerned, the Vikings now started for a
raid westward along the Thames valley : the camps
at Sinodun and Pusey, both large and formidable
structures, possibly represent their halting-places
on the first and second nights of their advance.
The third day took them to Ashdown, in the
" Vale of the White Horse." But they found there
was still heavy fighting in prospect : the untiring
Ethelred and Alfred had rallied their beaten host,
and were now hanging on the invaders' heels and
making it impossible for them to scatter after
plunder. The heathen kings Halfdan and Bagsceg
thereupon determined to take the offensive, and
to attack and scatter the men of Wessex before
proceeding farther with their raid. They were
encamped high on the ridge of the Berkshire
Downs, while Ethelred and Alfred lay at some
distance below them.

Two such warriors as the sons of Ethelwulf
were not likely to decline a fair battle in the open.
When the Danes drew up in front of their camp

1 3 2 King Alfred

in two heavy bodies, the English arrayed them-
selves in two corresponding masses. It is now
that we get our first concrete and personal notice
of Alfred as warrior. His brother the king, pious
even to superstition as his father had been, lingered
behind in his camp hearing the mass. News was
brought him that the Danes were on the move,
but he swore that he would not leave his tent till
the priest had finished the last word of the service.
Alfred meanwhile, not less pious but more practical
than his brother, was in his proper place at the
head of his division. He waited long for Ethel-
red, but the king came not, and meanwhile the
Danes were drawing near, moving downward in
good order along the hillside. If they struck the
English host while it stood idly halted on the
lower slope, it was certain that they would bear it
down by their mere impetus. Then Alfred, taking
all the responsibility upon himself, ordered the
men of Wessex to advance up the ridge. The
four hostile divisions met with a great crash on the
down-side, where a single stunted thorn was long
pointed out as the actual spot of collision. The
struggle was long and fierce ; but Alfred, " pushing
uphill like a fierce wild boar," broke the Danish
line, and finally the invaders gave way and fled.
King Bagsceg and five earls, two Sihtrics, Osbiorn,
Fraena, and Harald were slain, with many thousands
of their men. Ethelred only arrived in time to

As Warrior 133

urge the pursuit, which was continued for two
days, till King Halfdan and the wrecks of his host
succeeded in sheltering themselves behind the
palisades of their camp at Reading.

Western Christendom had won few such victories
over its invaders ; yet all the fruits of the success
vanished unaccountably in a few weeks. How it
came to pass we cannot say, but only fourteen days
after Ashdown another fight took place at Basing,
a dozen miles south of Reading, and this time
Ethelred was defeated. Two months later the war
was still lingering on the borders of Berks and
Wilts, and a battle was fought at Marton, near
Bedwyn, in which Ethelred and Alfred were
thoroughly beaten, and the king mortally wounded.
He died at Eastertide, and his decease was at once
followed by his brother's election to the throne

Hitherto, save at Ashdown, it has been impossible
to separate Alfred's doings from those of Ethelred.
We may guess that much of the untiring energy
shown by the men of Wessex was due to the activity
of the Etheling rather than to that of his pious
elder brother ; but we can prove nothing. When,
however, Alfred begins to reign in his own right,
we can at last make him personally responsible for
the conduct of the war.

At first, it must be confessed, we can detect
little more than mere courage and perseverance in

134 King Alfred

the young king's conduct. Of generalship we
find no evidence. His first battle was a disaster.
The victors of Marton, strengthened by a large new
"summer-army" from over-seas, pressed deeper
into Wiltshire. Ere Alfred had been a month on
the throne, he met them near Wilton, but his army
was small. The spirit of Wessex had begun to fail
after a year in which eight engagements with the
invaders had already been fought, four of which had
been bloody defeats. The thegnhood was terribly
worn down in numbers, the shire-levies so dis-
couraged that they came to the muster in number
far smaller than usual. But Alfred nevertheless
offered battle. Taking up a strong position on a
hill, he repulsed the Danes with great slaughter
when they attacked him. But his army, carried
away by their ardour, charged down from its
favourable post to cut up the defeated enemy.
The Vikings rallied, and turned on their scattered
pursuers, whom they finally drove from the field.
Thus inauspiciously began Alfred's independent
military career. But in spite of their victory the
Danes, who had suffered almost as much as the
English in this year of battles, consented to retire
from Wessex on receiving a moderate sum of
money. Alfred paid them, though he must have
been aware that he was only buying a short respite.
Time, however, was all-valuable to a king who
wished to reorganise his exhausted realm.

As Warrior 135

For the next four years (872-875) there was
comparative peace in Wessex : the enemy was em-
ployed partly on the Continent, partly in the con-
quest of Mercia, whose eastern half they annexed
in 874, handing over the western part as a vassal
kingdom to " an unwise thegn named Ceolwulf,"
who fondly thought that it was possible to settle
down as a vassal of the greedy Northmen. Alfred's
main endeavour in these years was to develop a
navy ; he " built galleys and Jong-ships," and
exerted himself to find trained crews for them,
hiring " pirates" converted Danes, we may suppose
to teach his own men seamanship. The begin-
nings of this national fleet must have been modest,
for the chronicler thinks it a fact of note that the
king's galleys were able in 875 to attack seven
Viking ships, take one, and chase the rest out to
sea. Two years later, however, the squadron, as
we shall see from its doings, must have developed
to a more formidable strength.

It was not till 876 that Alfred's reorganisation of
his realm was put to the test. In that year a great
Viking host under the kings Guthrum, Oskytel, and
Amund made a sudden dash into Wessex, appeared
in Dorsetshire, and seized Wareham, where they
stockaded themselves between the Frome and the
Trent in one of their usual water -girt camps.
Alfred was soon upon them with the whole levy of
Wessex, and held them so tightly blockaded he

136 King Alfred

made no attempt to storm their works after the
experience of Reading that they asked for terms,
gave hostages, swore their greatest oath, and
promised to depart. But when the king was off
his guard all that part of the host that was provided
with horses made a sudden sally, slipped through
the English lines, and rode day and night till they
reached Exeter, which they took by surprise.
There they again stockaded themselves, and lay en-
trenched for the winter of 876-877. The indefati-
gable king followed them, again drew lines round
their camp, and beleaguered them till they were
oppressed with famine. They were depending for
their relief on a squadron which was to run down
the Channel and join them at the mouth of the
Exe ; but Alfred sent his fleet, such as it was, to
intercept the incoming pirates. There was an en-
gagement somewhere off the south coast, from
which the Danes retired without winning a victory,
and immediately after a great storm cast their
vessels on the cliffs of the Isle of Purbeck. A
hundred and twenty galleys, with all their crews,
are said to have perished near Swanage. Reduced
to despair by this news, the Danes at Exeter
asked for terms, and departed for Mercia before
the summer was out.

This campaign had been such a complete success
for Alfred that the events of the next year are a
perfect surprise to us as indeed they were to the

A s Warrior 137

contemporary observer ; " slay thirty thousand of
these heathen in one day," says Asser, " and on the
next sixty thousand will appear." In the first days
of January 878 the main army of the Vikings,
starting from Mercia, made a sudden and unex-
pected descent on Wiltshire, cutting the West-
Saxon realm in twain. From a central camp at
Chippenham they raided east and west into Hamp-
shire on the one side and Somersetshire on the
other. At the same time a separate pirate fleet
which had spent its Yule in South Wales crossed
the Bristol Channel and threw itself upon North
Devon. It must have been the sudden and unex-
pected character of such an attack at mid-winter
which for a moment seemed to have crushed
Wessex. The king, who appears to have been in
the west at the time, threw himself into the Isle of
Athelney with a small band of his thegns and
personal retainers, and there built his famous
stockade in the marshes of the Parret. Elsewhere
there was panic : many men of note fled over-seas
to the Franks : large districts offered tribute and
submission to the Danish king Guthrum.

But the worst of the panic only lasted a few
weeks : before Easter the men of Devonshire
rallied and cut to pieces at Kenwith the army from
South Wales, slaying its leaders, Ingwar and
Hubba, and 1 200 of their followers, and capturing
their famous Raven standard. Somewhat later the

138 King Alfred

levies of Somerset, Wilts, and Hampshire assembled
in the forest of Selwood under the king in person
and marched against the Danish camp at Chippen-
ham. The invaders, thinking they were strong
enough to fight in the open, moved out to Edding-
ton to meet the advancing English. There they
were routed in a battle of which we know no
details, save that the king's men fought in one
dense mass not in two, as at Ashdown and that
the fight was long and desperate. The defeated
host fled to its stronghold at Chippenham, on the
east bank of the Avon. Alfred followed hard
upon them, and, pushing up to the very gates of the
stockade, built a camp almost in actual touch with
it, so as to make any sortie well-nigh impossible.
The Danes were quite unprepared for a siege ;
they had fondly imagined that Wessex was their
own, and had accumulated no stores. In fourteen
days they were starved out, and concluded with
the king the famous pact which is often, but inac-
curately, called the Peace of Wedmore. King
Guthrum and thirty of his chiefs consented to
receive baptism, did homage to Alfred, and under-
took to withdraw from his realm and to trouble
him no more. These conditions, it is surprising to
find, were punctually fulfilled ; the Viking became
a Christian, and withdrew his host first to Ciren-
cester in Mercia and then to East Anglia, where
they all settled down and gave no trouble for some

As Warrior 139

years. A great fleet which had come up the
Thames as far as Fulham, and had been harassing
Kent and Western Wessex, lingered some months
after Guthrum's defeat, but gave up its enterprise
in the spring of 879, sailed off eastwards, and set
itself to ravage Flanders.

The peace of 878 is rightly taken as the
turning-point of Alfred's reign. He had so
thoroughly impressed upon the Vikings the notion
that in Wessex they would meet hard blows and
small plunder that for some years they gave his
realm a wide berth, and devoted their main atten-
tion to the Prankish kingdoms, where the imbecile
Charles the Fat was just about to start upon his
disgraceful career. It was more profitable to
blackmail realms whose kings shirked battles and
proffered rich tribute than pay a visit to the inde-
fatigable ruler of Wessex. The events of 872-878
had made Alfred thoroughly well acquainted with
every wile of Danish warfare ; he was not likely
again to be taken by surprise, or caught unawares
by an attack in time of truce or negotiation. In
the numerous wars of his later years he shows a
mastery over his opponents which he was far from
possessing in the days of Reading or Wilton. In
especial the great struggle of 893-896, when he had
to face dangers quite as complicated and pressing
as those of 872 or 878, found him so well prepared
that its issue was never seriously in doubt, though

140 King Alfred

the seat of war was perpetually shifting over every
region between Kent and Chester, Essex and
Exeter.

The first occupation to which Alfred seems to
have devoted himself after the peace of 878 was
the further development of his fleet. In 882 he
actually went out with it in person and destroyed
a small Viking squadron. In 885 he took the
more daring step of sending it northward into
hostile water. The East Anglian Danes having,
after seven years of peace, broken their pact with
him, he sent a squadron from Kent all up the
Essex coast, and destroyed sixteen long-ships at the
mouth of the Stour. Unfortunately his victorious
vessels were intercepted by the whole force of the
Danelagh ere they could return, and suffered a
disastrous defeat. It was not till some years later,
and when his last great war on land was over, that
Alfred tried his final naval experiment, building
" long-ships that were nigh twice as large as those
of the Danes, some with sixty oars, some with
more. They were both steadier and swifter, and
also higher than others, and were shaped neither
as the Frisian nor the Danish ships, but as it
seemed to himself that they would be most handy."
The natural result was the destruction of more
than twenty Viking ships along the south coast in
the sole summer of 897.

The second expedient which Alfred took in

As Warrior 141

hand was the systematic construction of fortifica-
tions. Not only were the towns encouraged to
surround themselves with strong ditches and pali-
sades, but "burhs" moated mounds girt with
concentric rings of ditch and stockade were
erected at strategical points. London, recovered
from the East Anglian Danes in 886, was made
far stronger than it had ever been before by the
patching up of its ancient Roman walls. It was
filled with a new colony of warlike settlers, and
became an outpost of Wessex to the north of the
Thames. The consequences of the fact that the
larger English towns were no longer open but well
fortified are clearly seen in Alfred's later wars.
The Danes cannot capture important places at
the first rush, as they had done with York, Win-
chester, and London thirty years before. They
have to lay siege to them in full form, and always
before the siege is many days old the indefatigable
king appears with an army of relief. The invaders
had then either to fight, to take to their ships, or
to stockade themselves in their entrenchments and
suffer a leaguer themselves. Generally they chose
the second alternative, as at Rochester in 886,
when they abandoned their horses, their stores, and
all their heavy plunder, and sailed off the moment
that the army of succour came in sight. The
same scene occurred at Exeter in 894. The im-
portance of fortified places in keeping the Danes

142 King Alfred

employed till the fyrd could assemble can hardly
be exaggerated. The only stronghold which did
not serve its purpose was a certain " work only half
constructed in which there were some few country-
folk " near Appledore in Kent. This fell before an
attack of the "Great Army " in 893.

It would seem that the system by which Alfred's
" burhs " were maintained was not unlike that
which Henry the Fowler employed in Germany
a generation later. To each stronghold there was
allotted, as it would appear, a certain number of
" hides " of land in the surrounding region. All
the thegns dwelling on these hides were responsible
for the defence of the burh. Probably they were
bound to build a house within it, and either to
dwell there in person, or to place therein a substi-
tute equally competent with themselves for military
purposes. It would seem that the " cnih ten-guilds"
of London and several other places were the
original associations of these military settlers whom
Alfred and his immediate successors placed in their
burhs. Of the local distribution of the fortresses
we have a precious relic in the " Burgal Hidage,"
a document belonging to the very early years of
the tenth century, which gives a complete list of
all the land dependent on the burhs of Wessex,
and certain materials for the regions north of
Thames also, where Edward the Elder was begin-
ning to encroach on the Danelagh by means of his

As Warrior 143

new foundations. That the system started with
Alfred rather than his son seems to follow from
two passages in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, where,
under the year 894, we hear of " the king's thegns
who were at home in the fortresses," and again of
the fyrd being " half in the field and half at home,
beside those men that held the burhs."

One of Alfred's devices of fortification deserves
a special mention, as being new on this side of the
Channel, though some partial precedents for it can
be found in the wars of the Franks. In 896 the
main body of the Viking invaders had concentrated
at the Thames mouth, and then pushed up the
river Lea to a spot fifteen miles from London,
dragging their fleet with them. Noting the
narrowness of the river, Alfred built two formid-
able burhs, one on each side of the Lea, just below
the Danish camp, and then obstructed the stream
probably by palisades and floating booms
between the two forts. The hostile fleet was so
securely " bottled up " that the Vikings had to
abandon it when they moved off" on land, and the
Londoners were able to bring back the whole of
the galleys to their city when the enemy was gone.
Beside the building of a fleet, and the systematic
use of fortification, we have strong evidence that
Alfred employed the third means of strengthening
his realm that we indicated in the beginning of this
chapter that of increasing the numbers of the

144 King Alfred

thegnhood, the professional military class. We are
unfortunately not able to separate his work from
that of his successor, Edward the Elder ; but as
Alfred was a man of far more original genius
than his son, we may fairly suspect him of being
the originator of the scheme. It took the shape of
enlisting in the ranks of the thegnhood all the
more wealthy and energetic of the middle-classes
both in the country-side and in the towns. Every
ceorl who " throve so that he had fully five hides
of land, and a helm and a mail-shirt, and a sword
ornamented with gold," was to be for the future
reckoned " gesithcund," or as another law phrased
it, " of thegn-right worthy." A second draft of
the first-quoted document even allows a ceorl who
has the military equipment complete, but not fully
the five hides of land, to slip into the privileged
class. The same privilege was given as a premium
for energy among town-dwellers to " the merchant
who had fared thrice over the high seas at his own
expense."

In return for their promotion in the social scale,
ceorl and merchant alike were of course bound to
follow the king to the field in full mail when he
raised his banner, and no longer got ofF with the
less arduous service expected from mere members
of the shire-levy. We cannot doubt that such
measures caused a large increase in the numbers of
the thegnhood, and thereby provided the king with

As Warrior 145

a more efficient and better armed core for the
national host than his predecessors had ever
possessed.

The campaigns against Hasting and the " Great
Army" in 893-896 give, as we have already said,
the best test of the efficiency of Alfred's reorganisa-
tion of his realm. The invaders came ashore in
two places, Appledore in Kent and Milton by the
Thames mouth. Each host found itself at once
observed by a strong force, and unable to disperse
for plunder. The king " encamped as near to them
as he had room for the wood-fastnesses and the
water-fastnesses, so that he might reach either if
they might seek a field. Then they tried to go
through the weald in troops, on whichever side
there might not be a force. But each troop was
sought out by a band from the king's host, and
also from the burns." At last the whole host at
Appledore broke up and tried to march northward.
Alfred stopped them at Farnham, took all their
baggage, and drove them in disorder over the
Thames. The survivors joined part of Hasting's
army at Benfleet in Essex : the pirate king himself
was absent with the rest. Following hard on their
heels, the English stormed the camp, captured
Hasting's wife and sons, and took a vast booty.
But Alfred was not in person with this army : a
third Viking host of a hundred ships had laid siege
to Exeter, and he had flown westward to deal with

146 King Alfred

it. On his approach the Vikings took to their ships
and sailed up to the Channel and round the North
Foreland to Shoeburyness in Essex, where they
picked up the remnants of the force that had been
routed at Benfleet, and some other reinforcements
from the East Anglian Danes. Swelled to a large
host by these accretions, the army that had failed
at Exeter marched across Southern Mercia to the
Severn, and " wrought a work " at Buttington. 1
Here they were at once beset by Alfred's son-in-
law and most faithful servant, Ethelred Alderman
of the Hwiccas, who had with him the levies of
Somerset, Wilts, Gloucester, and Worcester. Ex-
pelled by him from the Severn valley, the Vikings
retired to their kinsmen in Eastern England.
There they again gathered reinforcements, and
returning to the west, seized the empty walls of
Chester desolate since Ethelfrith had sacked the
old Roman town in 606 and tried to establish
themselves there. But again they had no rest :
the forces of English Mercia, aided by the kings of
North Wales, laid siege to the place. Starvation
finally compelled the Vikings to abandon it. They
went back through the friendly territory of their
Northumbrian kinsmen, and returned to East
Anglia (895). Their last effort was made in
the following year, and consisted in the advance
up the Thames and Lea which we have already had

1 In Shropshire, and not to be identified with Boddington in Gloucestershire.

As Warrior 147

occasion to describe. There King Alfred assailed
them in person, and captured their fleet by the
device of blocking the river by his two burhs.
Deprived of their vessels the Danes made their last
march : pressing overland, they for the second time
entered the Severn valley and " wrought a work "
at Quatbridge. 1 Alfred followed them with the
bulk of his host, and lay opposite them as the
winter set in. It was impossible to get away from
this untiring pursuer, and in the next spring the
" Great Army " broke up in despair : " some
returned to East Anglia and some to Northumbria,
and those that were moneyless got themselves ships
and went south over sea to the Seine. Thanks be
to God, the army had not broken up the English
race" (896).

These splendid campaigns, known to us, alas !
only in outline, are the finest testimony to Alfred's
powers of organisation that could be given.
Wherever the Vikings appeared they were at once
met by a sufficient force and held in check. Their
strong camps could not defend them as of old :
sometimes the palisades were stormed, sometimes
blockade did the work, and the host had to depart
in order to save itself from starvation. Three
years of perpetual disaster tired out at last even
the obstinacy of the battle-loving Northmen. They
dispersed and sought other scenes of activity and

1 Now Quatford, in Shropshire, like their former stronghold at Buttington.

148 King Alfred

enemies less formidable than the great king of
Wessex.

For the last four years of his life Alfred was
undisturbed save by trifling raids of small squadrons,
which he brushed off with ease by means of the
new fleet of " great ships " which he had built.
The work of defence was done : Wessex was saved,
and with Wessex the English nationality. In a
few years the king's gallant son, Edward the Elder,
was to take the offensive against the old enemy,
and to repay on the Danelagh all the evils that
England had suffered during the miserable years
of the ninth century. That such triumphs lay
within his power was absolutely and entirely the
work of his great father, who had turned defeat
into victory, brought order out of chaos, and left
the torn and riven kingdom that he had inherited
transformed into the best organised and most
powerful state in Western Europe.

ALFRED AS A GEOGRAPHER

BY SIR CLEMENTS MARKHAM

ALFRED AS A GEOGRAPHER

HE single-minded devotion of King
Alfred to the service of his people is
shown in every action of his life ; and
one of the greatest, certainly the most
remarkable undertaking for that end, was the con-
veyance of knowledge to them in their own lan-
guage, through paraphrased translations. It was
thus that he strove to disseminate some acquaint-
ance with theology, moral philosophy, history,
and geography. It is a very striking and
suggestive fact that a ruler who surpassed all
others that the world has ever seen in wisdom and
insight, as well as in complete abnegation of every
selfish thought in his dealings with his people,
should have given so high a place to geography.
Alfred knew by experience that an acquaintance
with the relative positions of places on the earth's
surface was the necessary foundation of the kind
of knowledge required equally by the statesman,

152 King Alfred

the soldier, and the merchant ; and he therefore
gave its due place to geography in his grand
scheme for the enlightenment of Englishmen. In
this he was centuries in advance of his age, and
even now the standard in this, as in other respects,
is below that of the wisest of our kings.

Alfred, as was his wont, when he had resolved to
bring knowledge on any particular subject within
the reach of his people, diligently sought out the
best authority on geography. Ptolemy, Strabo,
and Pliny were unknown to his generation, still
hidden away in dark repositories and not to be un-
earthed until the dawn of the Renaissance. In the
ninth century the best geographical work was that
of Paulus Orosius, who had lived in the days of
the Emperor Honorius. He was a native of
Tarragona in Spain, and took orders in the
Christian church. Perplexed by the controversies
in his own country, the young Spanish deacon
undertook a voyage to Africa, to receive the solu-
tion of his doubts from the famous Bishop of
Hippo. Orosius secured the friendship of St.
Augustine, who sent him to Palestine on two
occasions before A.D. 416, and gave him oppor-
tunities for study. The result was a work in-
tended to refute the pagan opinion that the sack
of Rome by Alaric was due to the anger of the
ancient gods. It, however, contained much more
than mere polemics, and was in fact a summary of

As a Geographer 153

the world's history from the creation to the days
of Honorius, with a sketch of all that was then
known of geography.

Alfred brought high qualifications to the task
of translating and editing Orosius. 1 In his boy-
hood he had twice made journeys to Rome, which,
as regards danger and hardships, may be compared
to an expedition to Lhasa at the present day. In
after life he had become very intimately acquainted
\with the topography of his native island, from
the Humber to the shores of the Channel, and
from the Severn to the East Anglian coast. As
a military tactician he knew each river, valley, hill
range, and plain ; as an administrator he had ex-
amined the capabilities of every district ; and as a
naval commander, the harbours and estuaries, the
tides and currents were familiar to him. So far
as his personal knowledge extended, Alfred was
a trained geographer. He was also in a position
to increase the information derived from his own
personal experiences by diligently collecting
materials from those foreigners who frequented his
court, and by reading. He had the gift of assimi-
lating the knowledge thus acquired, and he studied
most diligently. Above all, he was eager to in-

1 The manuscripts of Alfred's Orosius are in the Cottonian collection and
in the Lauderdale MS. They were used by Hakluyt. The work was first
edited by Daines Harrington and Reinhold Foster in 1773 ; and in 1855 a
literal English translation, with a facsimile, and the An^lo-Snxon text, were
published by the Rev. Joseph Bos worth, D.D.

1 54 King Alfred

vestigate unknown things for the great end he
always had in view the good of his people.

Alfred's design was to collect the best and most
extensive geographical information, without con-
fining himself to the text of Orosius. Thus he
commences his geographical work with a very
lucid account of the peoples of central Europe and
of their relative positions, which is not in the work
of Orosius, but was composed by the king himself
from his own sources of information. It is the
only account from which such details in that age
can be derived.

The East Franks, he tells us, were established
east of the Rhine and north of the source of the
Danube. The Swabians were to the south and
beyond the Danube, while the Bavarians were
farther east round the town of Ratisbon, both
peoples occupying the country up to the foot of
the Alps. East of the Bavarians was Bohemia,
and to the north-east was Thuringia. Turning to
the north of Germany the king places the old
Saxons round the mouth of the Elbe, and the
Frisians farther west. North of the Elbe were
the Angles, who nearly all came to people England,
and the Danes on the mainland and in the island
of Zealand. King Alfred then gives some details
respecting the Slavonic tribes in the eastern part of
Germany. The Afdrede were established in what
is now Mecklenburg, and the Wylte in that part

Asa Geographer 155

of the mark of Brandenburg then called Hasfeldan.
The Sysyle were in a part of Eastern Prussia
then known as Wineda-land. Eastward from the
countries of the Bohemians and Bavarians were
the Moravians ; and to the south, beyond the
Danube again, and extending to the Alps, was
Carinthia. A desert, by which the Karst may be
intended, extended between Carinthia and the land
of the Bulgarians, beyond which was the Byzantine
empire. To the east of Moravia was Wisl-land,
the region watered by the Vistula, Dalamensan,
Horithi, and Surpe. These Slavonic peoples
occupied Poland, and to the north-east was Ser-
mende, the modern Livonia.

Having given the relative positions of the
peoples inhabiting central Europe, King Alfred
turns to the north, and takes us to the countries
bordering on the British sea and the Baltic, or
Ost-sae as he calls it. The north Danes were then
in the provinces of Halland and Scania, now part
of Sweden, as well as in the islands. To the east-
ward were the Afdrede already mentioned as occu-
pying Mecklenburg, the Burgendas apparently on
the island of Bornholm, and Osti or Easterlings,
a Finnish race, inhabited Esthonia. On the
Scandinavian peninsula were the Sweon or
Swedes, the Northmen, and the Scride-Finnas
or " striding Finns." Far to the north, between
the Gulf of Bothnia and the Arctic Sea, includ-

156 King Alfred

ing Finmarken, was the waste country called
Cwenland.

Having given this most valuable summary of
the inhabitants of Central and Northern Europe
during the ninth century, King Alfred proceeds to
relate the particulars of two important voyages
made by distinguished seamen who had come to
his court and recited their adventures to him. The
first was an influential Northman or Norwegian
named Oht-here, or in old Norwegian, Ottar.
The name is derived from the two words oht
(dread or fear) and h#r or here (an army),
htfrmand, a warrior. The right meaning of Oht-
here is, therefore, " terror-causing warrior." This
able navigator "told his Lord King Alfred that
he dwelt northmost of all Northmen, on the land
by the west sea." The district in which he dwelt
was called Halgoland, the land of fire, or more
probably " the land of the northern lights." Oht-
here's home has been placed on the shores of Lerivik
Sound, between the Island of Senjen and the main-
land. " He said no man abode north of him. He
was a wealthy man in those possessions in which their
wealth consists," possessing 600 tame reindeer of
his own breeding, 20 horned cattle, as many sheep
and swine, and horses with which he ploughed a
small extent of tilled land. But his revenues were
chiefly derived from tribute paid to him by the
Laplanders, called Finns by the Norwegians, in

As a Geographer 157

furs and skins, birds' feathers, whalebone, and
ropes made from walrus hide. Oht-here called his
country North weg (Norway), and described it as
being very long and narrow, with all the pasture
and culturable land near the sea, which, however, is
very rocky in some places. Inland, he said that
there were high mountains, and farther to the
eastward were Sweden in the south and Cwenland
in the north. He added that to the north of
Halgoland the country was waste and desert,
except in a few places, where the Laplanders were
encamped for hunting, or on the sea-coast for
fishing in the summer.

Oht-here was evidently a man of high position
and great influence, one who was worthy of the
friendship and confidence of King Alfred. He
was inspired by the noble desire for Arctic explora-
tion and discovery, or, as he expressed himself to
the king, he desired to find out how the land lay
far to the north. So he undertook a most adven-
turous voyage to the northward, coasting along the
land, keeping the wild, rocky coast on his starboard
side and the wide Arctic Sea on what he called his
bcec-bord. Continuing this course for three days,
he passed beyond the most northern point to which
the whale-hunters ever went in those days. Still
pressing onwards, he attained the most northern
point ever reached by man, in about 71 15' N
The land then trended eastward, and, after

158 King Alfred

waiting a short time for a westerly wind, he shaped
a course along the coast to the eastward until he
reached the entrance of the White Sea on the fourth
day. Here he waited for a northerly breeze, which
enabled him to coast round the Kola peninsula
to the mouth of the Varzuga river, and thus to
discover the White Sea. Here he stopped owing
to fear of hostilities from the natives beyond.
These were the North Carelians, on the western
coast of the White Sea. Oht-here calls them
Beormas, and says that they had a well-peopled land.

Oht-here's discoveries included the whole of the
Arctic coast of Finmarken and the shores of the
White Sea as far as the mouth of the Varzuga.
He was the first to double the North Cape, and
Oht-here's farthest north held its ground for nearly
seven hundred years, until the voyage of Willoughby
and Chancellor in 1553.

Oht-here calls the country between the Gulf of
Bothnia and the Arctic Sea, Terfinna land, Ter
being the ancient name of the Kola peninsula.
Terfinna therefore means the Finns in Ter. He
describes it as entirely waste and uninhabited, ex-
cept where the Laplanders were encamped for
hunting or fishing. He was told many tales
respecting their country by the Beormas, but
King Alfred did not record them, because they
were only from hearsay, and not things the ex-
plorer could testify to from personal knowledge.

As a Geographer 159

Besides discovery, another object of Oht-here's
voyage was the capture of walrus, for the sake of
their hides and tusks. He calls the walrus a horse
whale, but says that it is much smaller than other
whales ; thus correctly including whales, usually
supposed to be fish in ancient times, under the
head of mammalia, by classing them with the
walrus. The length of a walrus is given, with
approximate accuracy, at 14 feet. Oht-here told
King Alfred that the great whales were from 96
to 100 feet long, and that the best whale-hunting
was off his own country of Halgoland. The skill
and energy of those old Norsemen must have been
most remarkable, for Oht-here says that his was one
of six vessels which killed sixty whales in two days.
The ships must have had very large crews, and a
considerable number of boats for each ship, to have
achieved such an unequalled feat, probably without
a rival in the whole history of whaling. But it is
more likely that Oht-here alluded to walrus or
" horse whales."

Oht-here also described to the king a voyage
to the south from Halgoland, along the coast of
Norway, to Denmark and Slesvig. He said that
with a fair wind, and anchoring each night, the
voyage from Halgoland to a port he calls Sciringe-
sheal, might be made in a month. Sciringesheal
is in old Norwegian S c ir ings- s air, which, in the
ninth century, was a town on the shores of a

1 60 King Alfred

small bay in Larviks-fjord, called Viks-fjord. In
the English of Alfred the termination salr (a
large room) is changed into heal (a hall). On
the bosc-bord is Norway, and on the starboard
side is Iraland and other islands. He then
describes a great sea running inland, the Kattegat
and the Baltic, with Jutland and Zeeland on the
other side. The Baltic, he adds, runs several
hundred miles up into the land. Oht-here sailed
from Sciringesheal southwards, through the Danish
islands to the coast of Slesvig, and reached the
port of Haddeby. Alfred adds the interesting
fact that the Angles dwelt in these lands round
Haddeby before they came into England.

Oht-here made a present of walrus ivory to
King Alfred ; but he was not the only adventurous
seaman who brought welcome information to the
king. A Dane named Wulfstan gave him an
account of a voyage in the Baltic from Haddeby
to Truso, in what is now Eastern Prussia, and
described to him the manners and customs of the
people he visited.

Haddeby, mentioned both by Oht-here and
Wulfstan, was no doubt an important trading port
in the ninth century. The word, as given by
Alfred, is <et H<ethum, meaning "at the Heaths."
" The town at the heaths " is the same as Hedeby
or Haddeby, the ancient name of Slesvig. It is
now a pretty little village, with a very ancient

As a Geographer 1 6 1

granite church, on the banks of the river Schley,
just opposite the more recent town of Slesvig.
Wulfstan made the voyage from Hadtteby to
Truso in seven days. He had the Danish islands
on the boec-bord) and the land of the Wends, now
Mecklenburg, and Pomerania on his starboard
side ; then the Swedish provinces of Bleking and
Smaland, and the isles of Bornholm, Gland, and
Gothland, to the north ; and the mouth of the
Vistula to the south. Wulfstan finished his voyage
by entering the inland sea, called Frische Haff, by a
narrow strait, and going up the Elbing river to the
town of Truso on the Drausen lake in East Prussia.
Wulfstan gave a very full account of this
country of Estum or Esthonia to King Alfred.
There are kings in every town, he says, and the
richer folk drink mare's milk (probably the fer-
mented kumiss made from milk), while the poor
people drink mead. The custom of treating
their dead is to keep the bodies preserved in ice for
a long time before they are burnt, during which
there is drinking and festivities. The dead man's
property is then divided into several lots, and
placed along a course to be raced for, so that swift
horses become uncommonly dear. King Alfred
was also much struck by Wulfstan's account of the
way in which the Esthonians could produce cold,
both for preserving the dead during the period of
festivities, and for icing their liquors.

1 62 King Alfred

In recording the information received from his
two sailor visitors, Oht-here and Wulfstan, the
clearness and perspicacity of the narrative, and the
rejection of all hearsay evidence, show that King
Alfred was most careful and conscientious, anxious
to secure accuracy, and only to present to his
people what was reliable. The voyages themselves
are interesting, because they prove that, although
the seas were alive with the piratical fleets of Rolf
the Ganger, Hasting, and many other warriors
bent only on pillage and rapine, there were at the
same time peaceful ventures and even expeditions
of discovery.

The first voyage of Oht-here is memorable as
the first Arctic expedition undertaken for the sake
of discovery and exploration. There is nothing
to show that it was undertaken under the auspices,
or even with the knowledge, of Alfred. But it is
certain that it received the cordial approval of our
great king, and that its motives had the sympathy
and appreciation of one who, in regenerating the
navy of England, knew well that such training
was of vital importance to a naval power. The
welcome he extended to his Arctic visitor, and the
care with which he elicited his information and
recorded it, leave no doubt of what Alfred's feelings
were upon this subject. When it is remembered
that Alfred the Great rebuilt the English navy
from his own designs, improving upon the lines of

As a Geographer 163

Danish and Norse ships, it ought not to be for-
gotten, in the same connection, how highly he
valued the work of Arctic exploration. He at
least knew that a training in deeds of seaman-like
daring and adventure is as important as the building
of ships for securing and maintaining power on
the sea. We have no further knowledge of the
personal intercourse between the first Arctic ex-
plorer and " his Lord King Alfred." He was
cordially received at the English court, he pre-
sented the king with an offering of walrus ivory,
and there must have been conversations in the
course of which the king received and sifted the
evidence of his guest, until he was able to record
the lucid and accurate narrative which has been
preserved and handed down to us.

After recording the events of the voyages of
Oht-here and Wulfstan, King Alfred returns to
the text of Orosius, where the geography of Greece
and the islands is discussed, as well as that of the
countries on the shores of the Adriatic. Thence
Orosius passes to Italy, France, and Spain ; and in
the latter country Cadiz and Betanzos in Galicia
are mentioned. France was personally known
to Alfred, who had visited the court of Charles
the Bald, but he gives no reminiscence of his
journeys. Nearly all Spain was then under the
enlightened rule of the powerful western Khalifas
Almondhir and Abdallah, while the Christian

164 King Alfred

kings of Oviedo fought to maintain a struggling
existence in the mountains of Asturias. Even
Leon was not occupied by them until after the
death of Alfred. In his reference to Britain and
the surrounding islands, including the Orkneys,
there is an allusion to " the uttermost land that
men call Thule," north-west of Ireland. Alfred
held it to be Iceland, apparently.

Africa is then treated of, with rather more
fulness. The positions of Egypt and Libya
Cyrenaica, of the Nasamones, near the Syrtis
Major, of Numidia, Mauritania, and the Atlas
Mountains, are laid down ; and after a passage
where Orosius remarks on the ingratitude of the
Egyptians to the memory of Joseph, King Alfred
inserts an interesting reflection of his own : "So
also it is still in all the world. If God for a
very long time grants any one his will, and he then
takes it away for a less time, he soon forgets the
good which he had before, and thinks only upon
the evil which he then hath."

The concluding part of the work refers to the
Mediterranean islands. Sicily is described with its
three points, Pelorus, Pachynum, and Lilybasum ;
but there is a serious mistake as regards its size,
perhaps due to an error in transcription. Finally,
there are notices of Scythia and Bactria, of Arabia
and India, of Palestine and the Jordan, and of
Cilicia, Isauria, and other places in Asia Minor,

As a Geographer 165

this part being from the text of Orosius. Africa
seems to have been conceived to be a long, narrow
continent, smaller than Europe, with no very great
extension towards the south.

When we consider the ignorance which prevailed
in England before Alfred's time, we can form an
idea of the immense importance of his geographical
labours and of the brightness of the light with
which he dispelled outer darkness in the minds of
his countrymen. His work was more especially
useful in his own time, owing to the intercourse he
encouraged with foreign lands, and to the frequent
missions he despatched and received. Every year
there was intercourse with Rome, when the alms
for St. Peter were despatched, generally in charge
of an alderman or a dignitary of the Church.
Embassies were received from Germany and the
northern countries, from France, and probably
from the Emperor Leo the Philosopher at Con-
stantinople, and from the great western Khalifa at
Cordova. King Alfred even despatched a mission
to India, at the head of which was Sighelm or
Suithelm, the Bishop of Sherburn. In those days
there were native dynasties at the principal seats
of Hindu civilisation. The Chohan kings were
reigning at Delhi and Ajmir. At Ujjayana the
Malwa Rajas held a brilliant court, where literature
flourished, and where Kalidasa and his school
reached the highest flights of poetic imagination.

1 66 King Alfred

At Madura, in Southern India, was the cultured
Pandyon dynasty. It is probable that the visit of
King Alfred's envoy was to the Pandyon King of
Madura, for his instructions were to seek out the
shrine of St. Thomas, which has traditionally been
placed on the Coromandel coast. It is recorded
that the Bishop of Sherburn returned safely to
England, bringing back with him gems and other
products of a country which was destined, in after
ages, to become the brightest gem in the diadem
of the descendants of Alfred the Great.

Both through his promotion of intercourse with
distant lands and through his literary work, our
great king enlightened his people by disseminating
geographical knowledge. The first to encourage
Arctic exploration, the first to point the way to
eastern trade by the Baltic, the first to open com-
munication with India, his literary labours in the
cause of geography are even more astonishing.
There have been literary sovereigns since the days
of Timaeus of Sicily, writing for their own glory
or for their own edification or amusement. Alfred
alone wrote with the sole object of his people's
good ; while in his methods, in his scientific
accuracy, and in his aims, he was several centuries
in advance of his time. After his death there was
a dreary waste of ignorance, with scarcely even a
sign of dawn on the distant horizon. A few
Englishmen of ability, such as Roger Bacon and

As a Geographer 1 67

Sacrobosco, speculated and wrote on questions " de
sphterd," but there was no practical geography
until Eden and Hakluyt rose up, nearly seven
centuries after the death of our great king.
Richard Hakluyt was indebted to Alfred for
portions of his work, and he resembled his illus-
trious precursor somewhat in his zeal, his patriotism,
and his diligence. Hakluyt was, however, far behind
Alfred in scientific precision and insight, although
he lived so long afterwards, with seven more cen-
turies of experience to guide him. Even now
men of learning and research have their admiration
aroused at the accuracy of King Alfred's descrip-
tions, and at the pains he must have taken to reject
what was doubtful and to retain only what was
true. This called for the exercise of ability of a
high order, as well as patience.

Alfred the Great was, in the truest sense of the
term, a man of science ; and we hail him as one
who stands alone and unrivalled the founder of
the science of geography in this country.

ALFRED AS A WRITER

BY REV. PROFESSOR EARLE

ALFRED AS A WRITER

UR estimate of the literary achieve-
ments of King Alfred will depend
very much upon what we are in
the habit of thinking about his early
education. If we are content to accept the
story in Asser, that he had reached his twelfth
year before he had learned to read, then we
must reckon his literary career as a prodigy, a
phenomenon which defies explanation. Or, if
that will not satisfy us, we may liken him to his
grandfather's contemporary the great Charles, who,
being illiterate, knew the value of learning, and
surrounded himself with learned men. On this
theory it would follow that the writings of King
Alfred are his only in that sense in which all
works and monuments are said to belong to the
king who has ordered them and paid for them.
He who refuses to be satisfied with either of these
alternatives can hardly fail to question the story
about Alfred and the picture-book.

The Saxon Chronicle says that Alfred was sent

172 King Alfred

to Rome in the year 853, at which time he was a
little boy. This statement naturally suggests that
he was sent to reside at the English College in
Rome for the benefit of his education. But this is
blurred in Asser by the further statement that he
went to Rome a second time in the very next
year ; which has the effect of reducing his travels
to mere excursions. The second journey to Rome
is not in the Chronicle, and it looks rather like an
artifice, designed to parry the natural inference
that the journey to Rome was for a prolonged and
educational residence. Perhaps the author of
"Asser's Life" was minded to make his hero a
prodigy, and to this end the picture-book story
must by all means be protected and maintained.
These variations had the effect of shaking the
credibility of the narrative, and raising doubts as
to whether Alfred ever went to Rome at all. The
statement in the Chronicle got involved in that
cloud of unreality which overshadows so much of
Alfred's history.

Happily this particular point is now quite cleared
up. A letter has been discovered, written by Leo
IV., the reigning Pope in the year 853, and ad-
dressed to King ^thelwulf, the father of Alfred,
announcing the safe arrival of the boy. This
discovery has added a new confirmation to the
Chronicle, and has established it once for all as a
firm historical fact, that Alfred was sent to Rome

As a Writer 173

in the year 853. If now we interpret this step in
the most natural manner, as designed by his father
to send the child out of the way in dangerous times,
and to occupy his tender years with liberal studies,
we find the course of Alfred's literary develop-
ment well and reasonably accounted for. Indeed,
it seems in every way most probable that Alfred
enjoyed the best opportunities for study that the
times afforded, and that he used them so far as was
compatible with the vocation of a warrior. How
many years he spent in Rome is not known ; in the
reign of ^thered he was at home and he made a
conspicuous military figure while yet in his teens,
and this seems to indicate that he had never in his
book-learning forgotten that he would have to fight
for his country against the northern invaders.

The first seven years of his own reign (871-
878) were years of deadly struggle. In 877 his cause
seemed to be lost, but in 878 the King of
Wessex was victorious. He made peace with the
conquered Danes, and their king, Guthrum, was
baptized. And now he had to guide in peace the
nation which he had guided in war. He had to
reconstruct the social and political fabric which
had been shattered by the devastations and panics
of three generations. In all his reconstruction
there is manifested a purpose not only of restora-
tion, but also of improvement and reform. This
is conspicuous in his revision of the West Saxon

174 King Alfred

Laws. The Law-book then in use was that of King
Ina (688-726). When Alfred's code was published,
that of Ina was not abolished, but it was re-edited
in the same volume, after the manner of an appendix
to Alfred's Laws. That a new departure was
purposed is indicated by the new feature of a
Prologue composed of the Decalogue and kindred
selections from Scripture. This is to be under-
stood partly as a consecration of the new Law-
book ; but further, as the inauguration of a new
principle, namely, that laws are founded in right
reason and have their highest sanction in religion.
Before Alfred's time laws had rested upon tradi-
tion, deriving their force from the fact that they
were ancestral, or if reasoned at all were based upon
a stunted and barbaric type of reasoning. We
happen to have an extant example in which we can
compare a law of Ina's with Alfred's reform of it.
In the case of damage to a wood, the old law drew
a distinction between injury by fire and injury by
the axe, and that by fire was punished far more
heavily than the other, for this assigned reason that
fire is a thief and works silently, whereas the axe
announces itself.

" In case any one burn a tree in a wood, and it
come to light who did it, let him pay the full
penalty, let him give sixty shillings, because fire is
a thief. If one fell in a wood ever so many trees,
and it be found out afterwards, let him pay for

As a Writer 175

three trees, each with thirty shillings. He is not
required to pay for more of them, however many
they might be, because the axe is a reporter and
not a thief (forSon seo assc bij? melda, nalles
Ceof)."

This contrast could be retorted : for it might
be urged that if fire is a thief relatively to the
owner of the wood, so is it also relatively to the
defendant, for it had started up afresh when he
had left the place thinking that all was safe. The
worst that could be proved upon him was the
want of sufficient caution. In fact, the law is only
good as against arson, wanton or malicious ; and
for that case it is not severe enough. It may be
assumed that in the bulk of cases damage by fire
would be undesigned and accidental.

But where the axe is used there can be no
doubt about the motive. The man who fells
another man's timber does so plainly with intent
to steal, and the noise of the axe is not extenuating
but rather aggravating by reason of its audacity.

In Ina's law all such considerations were pre-
vented by two venerable maxims which said, " Fire
is a thief, but the axe is outspoken." Jacob
Grimm, in his Antiquities of Law, produced some
parallels from old German codes, but he gave the
palm to this of ours for its poetic tinge. More-
over, as an indication of the national instinct which
is favourable to whatever is open and straightfor-

176 King Alfred

ward, it may be interesting ; but the distinction
was bad as law, and it was abolished by King
Alfred. His new law equalised the penalty thus :
" If a man burn or hew another man's wood with-
out leave, let him pay for every great tree with
five shillings, and afterwards for each, let there be
ever so many, with five pence ; and a fine of thirty
shillings."

The closing words of the king's Prologue are
as follows :

" I, Alfred the King, gathered these (laws) to-
gether and ordered many to be written which our
forefathers held, such as I approved, and many
which I approved not I rejected, and had other
ordinances enacted with the counsel of my Witan ;
for I dared not venture to set much of my own
upon the statute-book, for I knew not what might
be approved by those who should come after us.
But such ordinances as I found, either in the time
of my kinsman Ina, or of OfFa, King of the Mer-
cians, or of Ethelberht, who first received baptism
in England such as seemed to me Tightest I have
collected here, and the rest I have let drop.

" I, then, Alfred, King of the West Saxons,
showed these laws to all my Witan, and they then
said that they all approved of them as proper to
be holden."

The same spirit of improvement and vigorous
initiative is manifested in his famous translations.

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

THE SEASONS JULY TO SEPTEMBER

(Cot toman Library)

As a Writer 177

Either by his own knowledge or by the good
advice which he knew how to obtain and appreciate,
he selected from the books then accessible those
which were calculated to be most generally useful
to his people. The chief books were five, the pro-
ductions of four authors : one by Orosius, written
about A.D. 412 ; one by Boethius, of about A.D..
522 ; two by Gregory the Great, written towards
A.D. 600 ; and one by the Venerable Bede, which
was brought to a close in the year 731. It may
be useful to add a few particulars about each of the
works which appear to have constituted the select
library of King Alfred.

Orosius was a young priest who came out of
Spain into Africa to visit Augustine, Bishop of
Hippo, at the time when that Father of the Latin
Church was writing his greatest work, which he
entitled the City of God. The occasion for this work
arose out of the sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth
in the year 410. A great outcry was made by the
pagans against Christianity, as if it had been the
cause of calamities which they attributed to the
displeasure of the ancient gods for their neglected
altars. In his City of God, which was conceived
as an answer to this charge, Augustine constructed
his argument upon a broad view of human history,
urging that events must not be interpreted in an
isolated manner, but must be taken with their
connection and sequence ; and then we shall dis-

1 78 King Alfred

cern signs of a great providential purpose guiding
mankind in a progressive course of amelioration.
The old dispensation prepared men for a fuller
revelation, and the spread of Christianity has
brought manifest improvement in the condition of
human life. The heathen empires of the world,
as Babylon in the East and Rome in the West,
have been active though unconscious factors in this
vast and beneficent process. The book is in fact
a philosophy of history, with the Gospel for its
pivot, and all events subordinated to this master
principle. The thesis is developed with an extra-
ordinary wealth of reasoning and illustration. To
make this great argument the more complete, Orosius
undertook, at Augustine's request, to write a com-
pendium of general history in the same spirit, and
accordingly he loses no opportunity of showing up
the calamities of the old heathen times, and in-
dicating the tendency of Christianity to mitigate
the horrors of war. This book of Orosius became
the recognised manual of general history down to
the sixteenth century.

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius was
the chief if not the sole representative of the
philosophy, the ethics, and the religious aspirations
of the ancients during the Dark and early Middle
Ages. The author is thus introduced by Gibbon :
4< The senator Boethius is the last of the Romans
whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged

As a Writer 179

for their countryman." Suspected by Theodoric,
the Gothic King of Italy, of the crime of Roman
patriotism, he was cast into prison, and a sentence
of confiscation and death was pronounced against
him, while he was denied the means of making
his defence. Chained and in view of death he
composed the Consolation of Philosophy, of which
Gibbon says : <c A golden volume, not unworthy
of the leisure of Plato or Tully, but which claims
incomparable merit from the barbarism of the
times and the situation of the author." x

Gregory the Great, who in A.D. 597 sent
Augustine with his missionary band to the King
of Kent, is a name which through the whole extent
of Anglo-Saxon literature is mentioned with a
peculiar veneration. From his writings the king
took two books to be included in his library of
English translations. The first was his Pastoral
Care (Cura Pastoralis\ a guide-book for the use
of the priest, to instruct the consciences of those
who come to him for spiritual counsel ; and as
it is the first, so it may safely be pronounced the
best of all manuals of the kind. Gregory's ideal is

1 It is a noted character of this book that while it contains much that is
acceptable to the Christian spirit and nothing that is repugnant to it, there is
not a word in it which might not have been written by a pagan of the sixth
century who had inherited the influences of centuries of Christianity. Those
who desire to know more about Boethius, and the various ancient translations
of his last work, and his influence upon mediaeval thought, and the contro-
versies of which he has been the occasion, should consult Bocthius, An Essay,
by Hugh Eraser Stewart, M.A. ; Blackwood and Son, 1891.

180 King Alfred

a world governed by conscience, and the spirit of
the Cura Pastoralis would transform all men
into worthy citizens of such a polity.

The other book of Gregory's which Alfred
took was of a different kind. The Dialogues are
stories of a sensational or even grotesque character,
with a religious moral. They are calculated for a
childish level of intelligence, and were designed to
compete with the degrading tales which were the
entertainment of barbarian circles. This book,
which enjoyed the highest popularity for centuries,
and was among the earliest books to be printed, is
now entirely neglected, and Alfred's translation
has not yet been edited.

Bede was born in the neighbourhood of Wear-
mouth in 672. In his seventh year he entered
the abbey recently founded there by Benedict
Biscop, who was the first abbot. In that and the
sister house of Jarrow he continued to his death
in 735. He wrote Hist or ia Ecclesiastica Gentis
Anglorum, the History of the Conversion of the
Angles and Saxons and of their Earliest Ecclesi-
astical Institutions. No other national church
possesses a history of equal merit. 1 This was the
youngest book on Alfred's list, and as Orosius

1 The only one to be compared with it is the History of Early Prankish
Christianity, by Gregory, the Bishop of Tours, with which, indeed, it has
been compared by Canon Bright, and the comparison is made in a generous
spirit.

A s a Writer 1 8 1

was, what Pauli calls it, 1 a Chronicle of the World,
so this was a History of England.

I have thus endeavoured to give some idea of
the books chosen by Alfred, as regards their rank
and place in general literature. Our next step
is to consider how Alfred dealt with these books
and what he made of them. In his mind the
translator's function was not to reproduce an
ancient author, but to produce a useful work.
How he treated Orosius may readily be seen by
any one who will examine the latest edition of the
translation, that by Dr. Sweet (Early English Text
Society). He hit upon the admirable plan of
printing opposite the translation the corresponding
portions of the Latin text, using italics for such
parts of the original as are not literally translated.
How great was the freedom of adaptation is
promptly seen by the swarms of italics with which
the Latin pages are bespangled. Besides these
adaptations there are substantial additions in the
shape of original contributions by King Alfred to
the knowledge of European geography. First there
is a map-like description of the nations of Central
and Northern Europe, which are comprised under
the name of Germania. The author begins with

1 Konig Alfred und seine Stelle in der Geschichte Englands, von Dr. Rein-
hold Pauli, Berlin, 1851. The Life of Alfred the Great, Translated from
the German of Dr. R. Pauli. To which is appended Alfred's Anglo-Saxon
version of Orosius. With a literal English translation, etc. London,
1853. (Bonn's Antiquarian Library.)

1 82 King Alfred

a sketch of his area : by east and west, from the
Don to the sea about Britain ; by north and south,
from the Danube and Euxine to the White Sea.
Coming to details, he starts with the East Franks
(whose land-mark and memorial now Jives in
Frankfort), and with these East Franks for a
centre he gives the relative positions of Swabians,
Bavarians, Bohemians, and Thuringians, to the
north of whom lie the Old Saxons, who are bounded
on the west by Elbe-mouth and Friesland. From
this point the Old Saxons become the pivot of the
description.

This new piece of geographical literature is
followed by two narratives of northern voyagers :
Oht-here, who had explored the coast of Norway
from where is now Christiania to far round the
North Cape ; and Wulfstan, who explored the
southern coasts of the Baltic, and describes the
strange customs of the Esthonians.

These three pieces taken together constitute one
homologous group of ninth-century geography,
which fully justifies Reinhold Pauli's estimate, that
the " Germania " of Alfred is more extensive and
better defined than the "Germania" of Tacitus.

Besides this large insertion there are several
smaller ones in the course of the work, and these
may easily be found by observing where blanks
occur on the Latin page of Dr. Sweet's edition.
Where Orosius tells how M. Fabius refused a

As a Writer 1 8 3

Triumph when it was offered to him by the Senate,
the translator inserts two paragraphs, one describ-
ing a Roman Triumph, and the other relating the
origin and functions of the Roman Senate. In
Caesar's invasion of Britain, where Orosius tells how
he reached the river Thames, which (says he) is ford-
able in one place only ; the translator adds that the
ford is now called Wallingford. In such occasional
insertions we see the beginnings of that vast
apparatus of modern learning which is now relegated
to footnotes or to separate books of reference.

The conditions under which Boethius produced
that unique work The Consolation of Philosophy
may have tended to give the book a special attrac-
tion for the mind of the trouble-tossed king. He
certainly seems to have made great use of the book
as a text for his own reflections and meditations.
" For although King Alfred professed to translate
the work of Boethius, yet he inserted in various
parts many of his own thoughts and feelings," etc.
These are the words of one who up to the moment of
writing was the latest editor of Alfred's Boethius ; J
but now he must share the ground with Mr.
Sedgefield, whose new and greatly improved text
has just issued from the Clarendon Press. On

1 King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon Version of Bcethius, etc. By the Rev. Samuel
Fox, M.A., 1864. (Bohn's Antiquarian Library.) This book will continue
to be in request, because of the translation which faces the Anglo-Saxon
text.

1 84 King Alfred

Alfred's manner of dealing with his originals
Mr. Sedgefield says : " Even in his most faithful
translation, that of the Cura Pastoralis^ King
Alfred is by no means what in these days would be
called literal ; while in his Boethius it is the
exception to find a passage of even a few lines
rendered word for word." And, we may add, it
is precisely this free handling which gives to the
king's translations their personal interest, and no-
where is this peculiar attraction so strongly felt as
in his adaptation of Boethius.

German research has somewhat modified the
inference which ascribed to Alfred everything in
his version which is not found in the text. Old
Latin commentaries and scholia upon the De Con-
solatione have been discovered in continental
libraries, which contain similar expansions, especi-
ally those in the direction of Christian doctrine.
This discovery enlarges the literary interest, with
small detraction from the work of the king. His
glory is not of a kind to rise and fall by little
gradations of more or less. The suggestions
supplied by these commentaries are in their nature
very obvious. For, as was observed by Mr. Stewart,
the most casual reader of Boethius cannot fail to
be struck with the strong theism which breathes
through his pages, and invites the touch of para-
phrase to give it the full Christian sound, as when
the city of Truth, from which Boethius represents

As a Writer

i8 5

himself as exiled, becomes under the translator's
hand the heavenly Jerusalem ; a thought which is
expressed in the recently discovered scholia. But
in Lib. ii. metr. 4, where the translator brings in
the striking sentence, " Christ dwelleth in the vale
of Humility and at the monumental stone of
Wisdom," the old Latin annotator contributes only
this " The stone is Christ." Of the famous simile
which likens the world to an egg, there is this
much found in the scholia "That the sky and
the earth and the sea are in configuration like an
egg." See how this is developed by the poet : l

Du gestaSoladest Thou didst establish

]?urh ]?a strongan meaht, through strong might,

weroda wuldor cyning,

wunderlice
eorSan swa faeste

J>aet hio on aenige
healfe ne heldeS,

ne maeg hio hider ne }?ider
sigan J?e swiSor

J?e hio symle dyde.
Hwaet hi ]?eah eorSlices

auht ne haldeS,
is }>eah efn ej>e

up and of dune
to feallanne

foldan J>isse :
]?aem anlicost

Je on aege biS

1 The characters

glorious king of hosts,

wonderfully
the earth so fast

that she on any
side heeleth not,

nor can hither or thither
any more decline

than she ever did.
Lo nothing earthly

at all sustains her,
it is equally easy

upwards and downwards
that there should be a fall

of this earth :
likest in fashion to

how in an egg

and B S are of identical value, meaning TH th.

1 86 King Alfred

gioleca on middan, middlemost is the yolk,

glideS hwae]?re and withal gliding free

aeg ymbutan . the egg round about.

Swa stent call weoruld So standeth the world

stille on tille, still in its place,

streamas ymbutan, while streaming around,

lagufloda gelac, water-floods play,

lyfte and tungla, welkin and stars,

and sio scire scell and the shining shell

scriSeS ymbutan circleth about

dogora gehwilce ; day by day now

dyde lange swa . as it did long ago.

Book iii. metre 9 ; p. 182, ed. Sedgefield.

This simile occurs only in the poetical version
of the Metres, for there are two versions, one in
prose and another in verse, and it is agreed that
the versification has been done after and from the
prose ; but there is a question (into which we
cannot now enter) whether Alfred is the author of
both, or only of the prose version.

But before we quit Alfred's Boethius, we must
notice his treatment of Lib. ii. prosa 7, where we
may discover something more than free handling.
In the first three lines of that section he found a
profession of disinterestedness which he could
honestly appropriate to himself. The Latin speaks
thus : " Thou knowest, said I, that I was never
governed by the ambition of transitory wealth.
But material for action I did covet, that my talents
might not rust in idleness." Upon these lines for a

As a Writer 187

text the king made his chapter xvii., in which it
is evident that he forgets Boethius and speaks for
himself and of himself throughout. Applying
his author's words to himself, he expands them
into a veritable apology, explaining why a king
needs a great revenue, and ending thus : "I resolved
to live honourably as long as I lived, and after my
time to leave to the men who should come after
me my memorial in good works."

Now we come to the translation of the Cur a
Pastoralis, a work of high and manifold interest. 1
A copy of it was sent to every bishop in England.
The very copy which was addressed to Werferth,
Bishop of Worcester, is still in our possession. It
is preserved in the Bodleian Library, and may be
seen under glass by every visitor. This wonderful
relic, like the Alfred Jewel, seems to bring us into
personal contact with the great king himself.

In Alfred's Epistle to the bishops, which forms
his Preface to the Pastoralis, the mind of the king
is laid open in a very remarkable manner. Among
the many precious evidences which time has spared
for the perpetuation of a noble memory, the first
place must certainly (on the whole) be accorded to
this Preface. It exhibits in the clearest light the
reflections of the king upon the past and present

1 King Alfreds West-Saxon Version of Gregory's Pastoral Care, with an
English translation, etc. By Henry Sweet, Esq., Balliol College, Oxford,
1871 and 1872. (Early English Text Society.)

1 88 King Alfred

condition of his country, his deep sense of the vast
losses that had been sustained, his meditation on
the means of repair at his command, and the direc-
tion of his thoughts to that which is the only root
of effective reform, an enlightened and instructed
national conscience. In his contemplation of this
vital principle, he perceives the value of religious
education, and the necessity of beginning there.
At this point his discourse enters more into detail,
the practical drift of which is, that the Latin schools
being lost, and being (for the present at least) ir-
replaceable, it will be necessary to institute a system
of education through the medium of the English
language. Some scholars thought that education
could only be properly conducted through Latin,
and that the vernacular would lower its dignity
and value. They could not wholly approve of the
method of translations. Here Alfred had nearly
the same battle to fight as Jerome fought before
him, and in his apology he drew materials from
Jerome's store, adding the further inference that
if Scripture might be had in the vulgar tongue, why
not other good books ?

Children (he thought) should be taught to read
English, and this elementary stage of education
should be common to all of free birth. For the sons
of those who could afford to prolong the education
of their children, Latin studies should follow, and
such boys should be trained for the higher offices.

As a Writer 189

Here the English basis of education is propounded
as a course which was dictated by necessity ; but if
ever it should be demonstrated that this course is
absolutely the best, the credit of having been the
first to open the right path must not on that
account be denied to King Alfred. In the good old
times, Wessex had been far behind Northumbria
in the culture of the classics, but this had led to a
fuller development of the vernacular, and Alfred
found his mother tongue not inadequate to the
occasion, and large specimens of Latin literature
were rendered in West Saxon, and thus it happened
that the dialect of Wessex became to the after
literature of England what the Attic dialect was
to the literature of Greece.

The king's letter to the bishops begins thus :

DEOS BOC SCEAL TO WlOGORA CfiASTRE

THIS BOOK is TO GO TO WORCESTER

Alfred, king, commandeth to greet Wserferth, bishop,
with his words in loving and friendly wise : and I would
have you informed that it has often come into my re-
membrance, what wise men there formerly were among
the Angle race, both of the sacred orders and the secular ;
and how happy times those were throughout the Angle
race ; and how the kings who had the government of the
folk in those days obeyed God and His messengers ; and
they on the one hand maintained their peace and their
customs and their authority within their borders, while at
the same time they spread their territory outwards ; and

1 90 King Alfred

how it then went well with them both in war and in
wisdom ; and likewise the sacred orders, how earnest they
were, as well about teaching as about learning, and about
all the services that they owed to God ; and how people
from abroad came to this land for wisdom and instruction ;
and how we now should have to get them abroad if we
were going to have them. So clean was it fallen away
in the Angle race, that there were very few on this
side Humber who would know how to render their ser-
vices in English, or just read off an epistle out of Latin
into English ; and I wean that not many would be on
the other side Humber. So few of them were there that
I cannot think of so much as a single one south of
Thames when I took to the realm. God Almighty be
thanked that we have now any teachers in office.

Moreover, the king called also to mind what he
had himself seen in his early days, before all the
harryings and burnings of recent times : how the
churches of England had been well stored with
books, and the clergy were numerous, but they had
profited little by the books, because they could not
understand them, as they were not written in their
own language. At this point his eloquence rises
to a dramatic pitch, and " It is," he breaks out, " as
if they had said : ' Our ancestors, who were the
masters of these sacred places, they loved wisdom,
and by means of it they acquired wealth and left
it to us. Here may yet be seen their traces, but
we are not able to walk in their steps, forasmuch
as we have now lost both the wealth and the

A s a Writer 1 9 1

wisdom, because we were not willing to bend our
minds to that pursuit.' ' Remembering all this,
he had marvelled very exceedingly at those good
scholars who were once so frequent in England,
men who had completely mastered the Latin books,
that they had not been willing to translate any part
of them into their own language. But he soon
answered himself and said, that they never could
have anticipated the present utter decay, and it was
their very zeal for learning which caused them to
abstain from translating, because they thought
that the path of education and knowledge lay
through the study of languages.

Then I remembered how the law of Moses was first
known in Hebrew ; and later, when the Greeks had
learned it, they translated it into their own language, and
all other books too. And later still the Latin people in
the same manner, they by means of wise interpreters,
translated all the books into their own speech. And so
also did all the other Christian nations translate some
portion of the books into their own speech.

Therefore to me it seemeth better, if it seemeth so to
you, that we also some books, those that most needful are
for all men to be acquainted with, that we turn those into
the speech which we all can understand, and that ye do
as we very easily may with God's help, if we have the
requisite peace, that all the youth which now is in Eng-
land of free men, of those who have the means to be able
to go in for it, be set to learning, while they are fit for
no other business, until such time as they can thoroughly

192 King Alfred

read English writing : afterwards further instruction may
be given in the Latin language to such as are intended
for a more advanced education, and are to be prepared for
higher office. As I then reflected how the teaching of
the Latin language had recently decayed throughout this
people of the Angles, and yet many could read English
writing, then began I among other various and manifold
businesses of this kingdom to turn into English the book
that is called Pastor -alts in Latin, and Hierdeboc (Shepherd-
ing-Book) in English, sometimes word for word, some-
times sense for sense, just as I learned it of Plegmund
my archbishop, and of Asser my bishop, and of Grim-
bald my priest, and of John my priest. After I had
learned it so that I understood it and could render it
with fullest meaning, I translated it into English ; and
to each see in my kingdom I will send one ; and on each
there is an "aestel" (on aelcre bi?5 an aestel), which is
of the value of 50 mancuses. And I command in the
name of God that no man remove the " aestel " from the
book, nor the book from the minster. No one knows
how long such learned bishops may be there, as now,
thank God ! there are in several places ; and therefore I
would that they (the books) should always be at the
place ; unless the bishop should wish to have it with him,
or it should be anywhere on loan, or any one should be
writing another copy.

It has never been satisfactorily decided what kind
of object is meant by the "aestel" which accom-
panied every one of the presentation copies of the
Hierdeboc. Dr. Sweet translates thus : " And
on each there is a clasp worth fifty mancus. And

As a Writer 193

I command in God's name that no man take the
clasp from the book, or the book from the
minster." Dr. Bosworth, in his Dictionary, ex-
plained aestel as a writing-tablet, and identified the
word with " astula " in Du Cange. Now it is not
easy to see the propriety of combining so personal
a thing as a note-book with a volume designed for
common use. Nor could such an object be a
fixture upon the great book, which is what the
king's phrase (on aelcre bis) seems to require. On
the other hand, Dr. Sweet's clasp is indeed a fixture,
but of such a kind as to be a part of the book
itself which could not be removed without wilful
mutilation, and it does not appear that the king in
his injunction is apprehensive of so flagrant an
outrage as that.

My own impression is that the clue to the
interpretation is furnished by a Glossary of the
eleventh century, which gives " indicatorium " as
the equivalent of asstel (Wright-Wulker, i. 327).
I imagine a marker either of metal or of wood
with metal fittings, so constructed as to be fixed
upon the binding, and to bring a small plank across
the page wherever desired. This would keep the
parchment flat when apt to buckle, would mark
the reader's or transcriber's place, and would mini-
mise the risk of injury by fingering. It would be
attached to one of the boards only in a movable
way, perhaps with a screw, and consequently would

13

i 94 King Alfred

require a strict and imperative rule to secure it
from misplacement. The derivation might well be
from "astula" ( = assula).

This great epistolary Preface is followed by a
second, of another theme and another type. The
first is conceived in the statesmanlike spirit of a
king who is meditating of civil order and educa-
tion in a country that has almost lapsed into bar-
barism. The second is the utterance of the literary
artist concerning the book he has translated, the
author and his merits, and the weight of his
authority, not disregarding the history and trans-
mission of the very codex over which he has been
at work. The first of these prefaces is in strong
and ragged prose ; the second is in heroic verse,
which recalls the tradition that Alfred was fond of
the old songs of his native land.

Pis aerendgewrit Agustinus
ofer sealtne sas suSan brohte
ieg-buendum, swa hit aer fore
adihtode drihtnes cempa
5 Rome papa. Ryhtspell monig
Gregorius gleawmod gind wod
Surh sefan snythro searoSonca hord.
ForSasm he monncynnes maest gestriende
rodra wearde, Romwara betest,
10 monna modwelegost, maerSum gefraegost.

SiSSan min on Englisc Alfred kyning
awende worda gehwelc, and me his writerum
sende su'5 and norS ; heht him swelcra ma

As a Writer 195

brengan bi Ssere bisene, Saet he his biscepum
15 sendan meahte forSaem hi his sume Sorften,
Sa Se Laedenspraece laeste cuSon.

I append an alliterative translation, which runs
almost line for line :

This epistle Augustine
over salt sea brought from the south
to us island-dwellers, just as it erst
indited had been by Christ's doughty soldier
5. the Roman pontiff". Much right discourse
did Gregory of glowing wit give forth apace
with skilful soul, a hoard of studious thought.
He of mankind converted the most
to the Ruler of heaven : he of Romans the best,
10. of men the most learned and widest admired.

At length into English, Alfred the King
wended 1 my every word: and me to his writers
south and north sent out ; more copies of such
he bade them bring back, that he to his bishops
15. might send, for some of them needed it,

those who with Latin speech had least acquaintance.

A few notes may be useful here. In the first
line the expression " This epistle" applies to the
entire work, because it is addressed by Gregory to
John, Bishop of Ravenna, and opens with a dedica-
tion in epistolary form.

The poet has a warm feeling for the very

1 My excuse for using an obsolete word is that it is Alfred's own, and I could
not do without it. Moreover, I was fortified by the hope that some poet
might adopt it and revive its transitival use.

196 King Alfred

manuscript he has been bending over, which he
venerates as a sacred relic, because it was one of
the books which were brought to this island by
Augustine, Gregory's chosen missionary.

In lines 8-10 is there not a reminiscence of the
closing lines of the Beowulf?

At verse 1 1 there is an abrupt transition, and
the after part is in an altered manner. The book
itself becomes the speaker, and in the diction we
recognise the manner of him who dictated to his
goldsmith the now famous legend :

ALFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN.

In line 1 2 we should particularly note the asser-
tion which is couched in the words " awende worda
gehwelc," a marked and idiomatic phrase which may
be represented in Latin thus : " vertit verborum
quodque," i.e. translated every word. This does not
point to any rule or restriction in the manner of
rendering, as if the translator had tasked himself
to a verbal fidelity, for in his first preface, speak-
ing of this very work, he had plainly said that he
had sometimes rendered word by word and some-
times sense for sense (hwilum word be worde,
hwilum andgit of andgite). But what he meant to
say was this, that whereas in his other translations
he had used his originals as passive material to be
wrought upon and converted as his own design and
purpose guided him, he had treated Gregory's

As a Writer 197

Pastoral Care as he would treat Scripture, wherein
nothing could be added nor taken away.

To conclude the subject of Alfred's Gregory's
Pastoral Care, let it be noted, that not only is it
one of the books which are said to have been trans-
lated by the king, but the statement is made by
himself speaking in the first person, and with a
singular circumstantiality, and that besides this the
book is distinguished by three peculiar incidents :
(i) That the translation was entire ; (2) that a
copy of it was sent to every bishop ; (3) that the
king was pleased to celebrate the memorable history
of the copy upon which he had worked.

As the chief of Alfred's translations the
Hierdeboc has naturally taken up much of our space,
and we must now be brief on the Dialogues.
And indeed we have the less to say because the
Alfredian version has not yet been edited. 1 It
exists in three manuscripts of the eleventh century,
one in the Cotton Library, and the other two at
Oxford and Cambridge. This translation is re-
puted to have been made by Werferth, Bishop of
Worcester, but the authority for this statement is
late and of doubtful value. There is no mention
of it in the preface, where the king speaks in the
first person, and acknowledges the services of friends
who had acted as transcribers. It runs thus :

1 It is said that a critical edition, based upon the three manuscripts, is in
preparation by Herr Hans Hecht.

198 King Alfred

" I, Alfred, by the grace of Christ, dignified with
the honour of royalty, have assuredly understood,
and through the reading of holy books have often
heard, that we to whom God hath given so much
eminence of worldly distinction, have peculiar need
at times to humble and subdue our minds to the
divine and spiritual law, in the midst of this earthly
anxiety ; and I accordingly sought and requested
of my trusty friends that they for me, out of pious
books about the conversation and miracles of holy
men, would transcribe the instruction that herein-
after followeth : that I, through the admonition
and love being strengthened in my mind, may
now and then contemplate the heavenly things in
the midst of these earthly troubles."

Such is the preface in the two manuscripts at
Oxford and Cambridge ; but in lieu of this the
Cotton manuscript has a preface in high-pitched
archaic and stilted prose wherein the book speaks
and sets forth that it was transcribed by order of
a Bishop Wulfstan from a copy that was given him
by King Alfred, whose name is glorified with
romantic superlatives of eulogy. This is poor
apocryphal stuff, but yet as a glimpse at the
posthumous cultus of Alfred's fame it is interest-
ing and even valuable. 1

Bede's History was the most modern of the
books on Alfred's list. In this book the translator

1 This bizarre composition was published by Dr. Krebs in Anglia, iii. (1880).

As a Writer 1 99

omitted considerable sections and added none.
There is no contemporary record that the trans-
lator was King Alfred. The earliest extant state-
ment of the kind is in ^Elfric's Homily on St.
Gregory's Day, where the preacher, referring to
" Historia Anglorum," as he calls it, adds, " which
King Alfred translated out of Latin into English."
Though a hundred years later, this is nevertheless
excellent testimony, and it has been supported
both by later historians and until recently by
modern critics.

But now the latest editor, 1 Mr. Thomas Miller,
has pointed out some radical differences of dialect
between the West Saxon of the Cura Pastoratis
and the English of this translation, which he
locates in the northern part of Mercia. He is
further guided by certain ecclesiastical considera-
tions (especially the contents of the parts omitted)
to select Litchfield as the spot where the translation
was probably made. The evidence is too multi-
farious to be stated here, but it seems worthy to
receive a searching examination and discussion.

So far we have treated of the more conspicuous
and better-known of the king's writings ; we must
now make mention of his minor works. In
" The Shrine : a Collection of Occasional Papers
on Dry Subjects," which appeared at irregular

1 Yet there is a later edition proceeding from the press, by Dr. Schipper,
Professor of English at Vienna.

2OO King Alfred

intervals from 1864 to 1870, the Rev. Oswald
Cockayne published for the first time two works
which claim to rank among Alfredian literature.
These he entitled, King Mlf red's Book of Martyrs
and Blooms by King ALlfred.

The Blooms are a translation or adaptation of
Augustine's Soliloquies and his Epistle to Paulina
on the Vision of God, intermingled with extracts
from the City of God and from Gregory, and from
Jerome, and withal many passages that appear to
be original. The English of the book is a debased
Saxon of the twelfth century. The title Blooms
is a translation of " blostman," which is repeatedly
used of the work in the Anglo-Saxon text. There
is a preface, in which the work is spoken of under
another figure that of collecting material to build
a house. At the close we read, " Here end the
sayings which King Alfred collected." Lappen-
berg classed the book (then unprinted) among the
apocryphal works of the king, and Pauli thought
that some compiler of the twelfth century had used
the name of the king whose memory was still
dear to the people. But in 1877 Professor
Wu'lker took it up, and he soon changed the
aspect of the case. He showed, in a highly con-
vincing manner, that this book has an intimate
relation with Alfred's Botthius, that it carries on
an argument which was broached there, and that
the two books must be from the same hand. His

As a Writer 201

inference is that it was done after the Boethius y
and that it was (apparently) the latest work upon
which the king was engaged. In 1894 the affinity
between the two books was further confirmed by
Mr. Frank G. Hubbard in Modern Language
Notes. Specially convincing are two brief touches
in chapter xvii., which echo the argument of the
similarly numbered chapter in Alfred's Boethius
which I have called an apology. The book is in
an imperfect state.

The Book of Martyrs is also imperfect, begin-
ning at December 31 with St. Columba, and
ending with St. Thomas, December 2 1 . The first
day of January is called " the eighth Yule day " (se
eahteSa geohhel daeg). There are four manu-
scripts of this book, and one of them, a fragment
of two leaves, appears to be of Alfred's time.
Moreover, of the saints which are recorded none
are later than the ninth century. Another argu-
ment is that under November 15 is given a Life
of St. Milus, which must (says Cockayne) have been
brought direct from Syria to England, and prob-
ably from Helias, the patriarch of Jerusalem, with
whom Alfred had a correspondence, according to
the nearly contemporary Leech Book. These
evidences appear to Wiilker to justify the conclu-
sion of Cockayne, " that the Martyr Book here
presented was at least in use in Alfred's time, and
was probably then composed."

202 King Alfred

We must now mention some titles of books
imputed to the king. By the third generation
after Alfred the tradition of his literary activity
had already assumed mythical proportions. The
Latin historian ^thelweard says that nobody
knows how many volumes he produced (volumina
numero ignoto}. William of Malmesbury says that
at the time of his death he was working at a trans-
lation of the Psalter. There, is a poetical work of
maxims and proverbs in which each of the detached
sentences begins with " Thus said Alfred." This
book opens with an assembly of notables at Seaford,
presided over by King Alfred, the Shepherd and
Darling of England. These Proverbs of Alfred
appear to be a composition of the twelfth century.
Moreover, he is said to have translated into English
the Fables of JEsop. He is also credited with a
treatise on Falconry.

But if in one direction the tradition has reached
a fabulous extreme, it is possible, on the other
hand, that there may still remain something of
his which has been overlooked or has not been
adequately recognised. I allude to the Saxon
Chronicle, about the king's relation to which there
is doubtless more to be said than has yet found a
place in literature. To speak but of one section
I never can read the annals of 893-897 without
seeming to hear the voice of King Alfred. Among
the illuminations of the approaching anniversary,

As a Writer 203

we may hope that a clearer light will be shed upon
this interesting question.

The Will of Alfred is a very remarkable docu-
ment, and opens to us more than might be expected
of family arrangements as to property. That
coupling of the names of JE)?ered and Alfred which
has such a singular and conspicuous appearance
in the Chronicle receives some very practical illus-
tration. There were at that time no professional
men to make Wills, and we have no cause to doubt
that the diction is Alfred's, as it purports to be,
being indited in the first person. There is much
in this document to provoke inquiry and research,
and it would probably repay the diligent student for
a closer investigation than it has hitherto received.

In our time when books are freely produced in
great abundance, it is hard to appreciate the power
and originality of King Alfred's work in the field
of literature. When we look about for his motives
we find such as these : need of occasional retire-
ment and solace in the midst of harassing affairs,
desire for personal improvement and edification,
strong intellectual appetites, etc. but all these con-
trolled by one chief and dominant purpose, that
of national education. Looking at the external
aspect of the king's situation we might have judged
it sufficient for him at that time to concentrate his
energies upon the restoration of material prosperity
and the strengthening of the national armaments.

204 King Alfred

That the prior necessity of these was not over-
looked, we have ample proof in the subsequent
progress of Wessex. But this did not satisfy the
kingly ambition of Alfred ; he craved for his
people the higher benefits of political life, their
moral and intellectual and spiritual development.
Curiosity may well prick us to ask from what
source far-reaching aims like these so suddenly
burst into our history, and that, too, at a time
of exhaustion at home and apprehension from
abroad. If King Alfred saw a connection be-
tween general education and the acquisition of
wealth (as there is some indication that he did),
this may partly explain the energy of his educa-
tional policy, but we still desiderate something
more. .If we might assume that being under a
strong sense of what he had himself gained by his
early education, he desired to impart the like advan-
tages to his people, then and only then the problem
would find its appropriate and adequate solution.

The beginnings of modern education in the
seventh century were quickened with the sense that
something had been lost, and the whole movement
was coloured with the sentiment of retrieval and
recovery. Two great historical exhibitions of this
effort are displayed in the Latin schools of Anglia
and of Charlemagne, which are in fact but two parts
of one movement, linked together by the name of
Alcuin.

As a Writer 205

King Alfred's educational revival is isolated
from the preceding by the wars and desolations
of the Wicingas, and it starts with a new basis
in the installation of the mother tongue as the
medium of elementary teaching. To this innova-
tion it is due that we alone of all European nations
have a fine vernacular literature in the ninth and
tenth and eleventh centuries. And the domestic
culture of that era, I take it, was the cause why
the great French immigration which followed in
the wake of the Norman Conquest did not finally
swamp the English language.

ENGLISH LAW BEFORE THE
NORMAN CONQUEST

BY SIR FREDERICK POLLOCK

T first sight Anglo-Saxon law may
appear merely barbarous to the
modern reader. In order to be
just to it we must consider its
surroundings.

Anglo-Saxon life was rough and crude as com-
pared not only with any modern standard but with
the amount of civilisation which survived, or had
been recovered, on the Continent. There was
very little foreign trade, not much internal traffic,
nothing like industrial business of any kind on a
large scale, and (it need hardly be said) no system
of credit. Such conditions gave no room for
refined legal science applied by elaborate legal
machinery, such as those of the Roman Empire
had been and those of modern England and the
commonwealths that have sprung from her were

1 A chapter from a work in preparation, reprinted here, with some
omissions and alterations, from the Law Quarterly Re-view.

14

2 1 o King Alfred

to be. Such as the men were, such had to be the
rules and methods whereby some kind of order
was kept among them. Our ancestors before the
Norman Conquest lived under a judicial system, if
system it can be called, as rudimentary in substance
as it was cumbrous in form. They sought justice,
as a rule, at their primary local court, the court of
the hundred, which met once a month, and for
greater matters at a higher and more general court,
the county court, which met only twice a year,
except, perhaps, for merely formal business. We
say purposely met rather than sat. The courts
were open-air meetings of the freemen who were
bound to attend them, the suitors as they are
called in the terms of Anglo-Norman and later
medieval law ; there was no class of professional
lawyers ; there were no judges in our sense of
learned persons specially appointed to preside, ex-
pound the law, and cause justice to be done ; the only
learning available was that of the, bishops, abbots,
and other great ecclesiastics. This learning,
indeed, was all the more available and influential
because, before the Norman Conquest, there were
no separate ecclesiastical courts in England. There
were no clerks nor, apparently, any permanent
officials of the popular courts ; their judgments
proceeded from the meeting itself, not from its
presiding officer, and were regularly preserved only
in the memory of the suitors. A modern student

'English Law before Norman Conquest 2 1 1

or man of business will at first sight wonder how
this rude and scanty provision for judicial affairs
can have sufficed even in the Dark Ages. But
when we have reflected on the actual state of
Anglo-Saxon society, we may be apt to think that
at times the hundred and the county court found
too little to do rather than too much. The
materials for what we now call civil business
practically did not exist.

There is now no doubt among scholars that the
primary court was the hundred court. If the
township had any regular meeting (which is quite
uncertain), that meeting was not a judicial body.
The King, on the other hand, assisted by his
Council of wise men, the Witan, 1 had a superior
authority in reserve. It was allowable to seek
justice at the king's hands if one had failed, after
due diligence, to obtain it in the hundred or the
county court. Moreover the Witan assumed
jurisdiction in the first instance where land granted
by the king was in question, and perhaps in other
cases where religious foundations or the king's
great men were concerned. Several examples of
such proceedings are recorded, recited as we should
say in modern technical speech, in extant land-
charters which declare and confirm the result of

1 There is more authority for this short form than for the fuller Witenn-
Gemot (not witenagemot as sometimes mispronounced by persons ignorant
of Old-English inflexions).

212 King Alfred

disputes, and therefore we know more of them
than we do of the ordinary proceedings in the
county and hundred courts, of which no written
record was kept. But they can have had very little
bearing, if any, on the daily lives of the smaller
folk. In important cases, the county court might
be strengthened by adding the chief men of other
counties ; and, when thus reinforced, there is hardly
anything to distinguish it from the Witan save
that the king is not there in person. 1 The king
might act as arbitrator or give advice to his
immediate dependents to compromise their suits ;
but there was no regular way of appealing from the
judgments of the popular courts.

Some considerable time before the Norman
Conquest, but how long is not known, bishops and
other great men had acquired the right of holding
courts of their own and taking the profits in the
shape of fines and fees, or what would have been
the king's share of the profits. My own belief is
that this began very early, but there is no actual
proof of it. Twenty years after the Conquest,
at any rate, we find private jurisdiction con-
stantly mentioned in the Domesday Survey, and
common in every part of England : about the
same time, or very shortly afterwards, it was re-

1 Such a court, after the Conquest, was that which restored and confirmed
the rights of the see of Canterbury on Penenden Heath : but it was held
under a very special writ from the king.

ILnglish Law before Norman Conquest 213

cognised as a main ingredient in the complex and
artificial system of feudalism. After having grown
in England, as elsewhere, to the point of threaten-
ing the king's supremacy, but having happily found
in Edward I. a master such as it did not find else-
where before the time of Richelieu, the manorial
court is still with us in a form attenuated almost
to the point of extinction. It is not material for
the later history of English law to settle exactly
how far the process of concession or encroachment
had gone in the time of Edward the Confessor, or
how fast its rate was increasing at the date of the
Conquest. There can be no doubt that on the one
hand it had gained and was gaining speed before
" the day when King Edward was alive and dead," ]
or on the other hand that it was further accelerated
and emphasised under rulers who were familiar
with a more advanced stage of feudalism on the
Continent. But this very familiarity helped to
make them wise in time ; and there was at least
some foreshadowing of royal supremacy in existing
English institutions. Although the courts of the
hundred and the county were not the king's courts,
the king was bound by his office to exercise some
general supervision over their working. He was
represented in the county court by the sheriff; he
might send out commissioners to inquire and report
how justice was done, though he could not inter-

1 The common form of reference in Domesday Book.

214 King Alfred

fere with the actual decisions. The efficiency of
these powers varied in fact according to the king's
means and capacity for exercising them. Under a
wise and strong ruler like Alfred or jEthelstan
they might count for much ; under a feeble one
like ^Ethelred they could count for very little.

A modern reader fresh to the subject might
perhaps expect to find that the procedure of the
old popular courts was loose and informal. In
fact it was governed by traditional rules of the
most formal and unbending kind. Little as we
know of the details, we know enough to be sure
of this ; and it agrees with all the evidences we
have of the early history of legal proceedings else-
where. The forms become not less but more
stringent as we pursue them to a higher antiquity ;
they seem to have not more but less appreciable
relation to any rational attempt to ascertain the
truth in disputed matters of fact. That task, in-
deed, appears to have been regarded as too hard or
too dangerous to be attempted by unassisted
human faculties. All the accustomed modes of
proof involved some kind of appeal to supernatural
sanctions. The simplest was the oath of one of the
parties, not by way of testimony to particular facts,
but by way of assertion of his whole claim or de-
fence ; and this was fortified by the oaths of a
greater or less number of helpers, according to the
nature of the case and the importance of the persons

TLnglish Law before Norman Conquest 2 1 5

concerned, who swore with him that his oath was
true. He lost his cause without a chance of
recovery if any slip was made in pronouncing the
proper forms, or if a sufficient number of helpers
were not present and ready to make the oath. On
the other hand the oath, like all archaic forms of
proof, was conclusive when once duly carried
through. Hence it was almost always an advan-
tage to be called upon to make the oath of proof,
and this usually belonged to the defendant. " Gain-
saying is ever stronger than affirming . . . Own-
ing is nearer to him who has the thing than to
him who claims." 1 Our modern phrase " burden
of proof" is quite inapplicable to the course of
justice in Anglo-Saxon courts : the benefit or " pre-
rogative " of proof, as it is called even in modern
Scottish books, was eagerly contended for. The
swearer and his oath-helpers might perjure them-
selves, but if they did there was no remedy for
the loser in this world, unless he was prepared to
charge the court itself with giving false judg-
ment. Obviously there was no room in such a
scheme for what we now call rules of evidence.
Rules there were, but they declared what number
of oath-helpers was required, or how many common
men's oaths would balance a thegn's. In the
absence of manifest facts, such as a fresh wound,
which could be shown to the court, an oath called

1 SEthelr, ii. 9.

2 1 6 King Alfred

the " fore-oath " was required of the complainant
in the first instance as a security against frivolous
suits. This was quite different from the final oath
of proof.

Oath being the normal mode of proof in disputes
about property, we find it supplemented by ordeal
in criminal accusations. A man of good repute
could usually clear himself by oath ; but circum-
stances of grave suspicion in the particular case, or
previous bad character, would drive the defendant
to stand his trial by ordeal. In the usual forms of
which we read in England the tests were sinking
or floating in cold water, 1 and recovery within a
limited time from the effects of plunging the arm
into boiling water or handling red-hot iron. The
hot-water ordeal at any rate was in use from an
early time, though the extant forms of ritual, after
the Church had assumed the direction of the pro-
ceedings, are comparatively late. Originally, no
doubt, the appeal was to the god of water or fire,
as the case might be. The Church objected,
temporised, hallowed the obstinate heathen customs
by the addition of Christian ceremonies, and
finally, but not until the thirteenth century, was
strong enough to banish them. As a man was
not put to the ordeal unless he was disqualified

1 There is a curious French variant of the cold-water ordeal in which not
the accused person, but some bystander taken at random, is immersed : I du
not know of any English example.

English Law before Norman Conquest 2 1 7

from clearing himself by oath for one of the reasons
above mentioned, the results were probably less
remote from rough justice than we should expect,
and it seems that the proportion of acquittals was
also larger. Certainly people generally believed to
be guilty did often escape, how far accidentally or
otherwise we can only conjecture. 1 Another form
of ordeal favoured in many Germanic tribes from
early times, notwithstanding protest from the
Church, and in use for deciding every kind of dis-
pute, was trial by battle : but this makes its first
appearance in England and Scotland not as a Saxon
but as a distinctly Norman institution. 2 It is hard
to say why, but the fact is so. It seems from
Anglo-Norman evidence that a party to a dispute
which we should now call purely civil sometimes
offered to prove his case not only by oath or com-
bat, but by ordeal, as the court might award. This
again suggests various explanations of which none
is certain. 3

Inasmuch as all the early modes of proof in-
volved large elements of unknown risk, it was

1 The cold-water ordeal was apparently most feared ; see the case of
Ailward, Materials for Hist. St. Thomas, i. 156, ii. 172 5 Bigelow, Plac. A.-N.
260. For a full account, see Lea, Superstition and Force.

1 See more in Neilson, Trial by Qjmlat, an excellent and most interesting
monograph.

3 Cases from D. B. collected in Bigelow, Plac. yf.-A''. 40-44, 61. Even
under Henry II. we find, in terms, such an offer, but it looks, in the light
of the context, more like a rhetorical asseveration in fact the modern " j'en
mettrais ma main au feu " than anything else : op. cit. 196.

2 1 8 King Alfred

rather common for the parties to compromise at
the last moment. Also, since there were no ready
means of enforcing the performance of a judgment
on unwilling parties, great men supported by
numerous followers could often defy the court, and
this naturally made it undesirable to carry matters
to extremity which, if both parties were strong,
might mean private war. Most early forms of
jurisdiction, indeed, of which we have any know-
ledge, seem better fitted to put pressure on the
litigants to agree than to produce an effective judg-
ment of compulsory force. Assuredly this was the
case with those which we find in England even
after the consolidation of the kingdom under the
Danish dynasty.

Rigid and cumbrous as Anglo-Saxon justice was
in the things it did provide for, it was, to modern
eyes, strangely defective in its lack of executive
power. Among the most important functions of
courts as we know them is compelling the attend-
ance of parties and enforcing the fulfilment both of
final judgments and of interlocutory orders dealing
with the conduct of proceedings and the like.
Such things are done as of course under the ordinary
authority of the court, and with means constantly
at its disposal ; open resistance to judicial orders
is so plainly useless that it is seldom attempted, and
obstinate preference of penalties to submission, a
thing which now and then happens, is counted a

English Law before Norman Conquest 219

mark of eccentricity bordering on unsoundness of
mind. Exceptional difficulties, when they occur,
indicate an abnormal state of the commonwealth or
some of its members. But this reign of law did
not come by nature ; it has been slowly and
laboriously won. Jurisdiction began, it seems,
with being merely voluntary, derived not from the
authority of the State but from the consent of the
parties. People might come to the court for a
decision if they agreed to do so. They were
bound in honour to accept the result ; they might
forfeit pledges deposited with the court, or put
their neighbours who had become sureties in an
awkward position ; but the court could not compel
their obedience any more than a tribunal of
arbitration appointed at this day under a treaty
between sovereign States can compel the rulers of
those States to fulfil its award. Anglo-Saxon courts
had got beyond this most early stage, but not very
far beyond it.

The only way to bring an unwilling adversary
before the court was to take something of his as
security till he would attend to the demand ; and
practically the only things that could be taken
without personal violence were cattle. Distress in
this form was practised and also regulated from a
very early time. It was forbidden to distrain until
right had been formally demanded in Cnut's time
to the exten_of three summonings and refused.

220 King Alfred

Thus leave of the court was required, but the
party had to act for himself as best he could. If
distress failed to make the defendant appear, the
only resource left was to deny the law's protection
to the stiff-necked man who would not come to be
judged by law. He might be outlawed, and this
must have been enough to coerce most men who
had anything to lose and were not strong enough
to live in rebellion ; but still no right could be
done to the complainant without his submission.
The device of a judgment by default, which is
familiar enough to us, was unknown, and probably
would not have been understood. An elaborate
system of never trusting one man without two or
more sureties (to describe it roughly) was used to
supplement these defects, and we may suppose it
to have been more or less effective, though clumsy
and tedious.

Final judgment, when obtained, could in like
manner not be directly enforced. The successful
party had to see to gathering the " fruits of judg-
ment," as we say, for himself. In case of con-
tinued refusal to do right according to the sentence
of the court, he might take the law into his own
hands, in fact wage war on his obstinate
opponent. The ealdorman's aid, and ultimately
the king's, could be invoked in such extreme cases
as that of a wealthy man, or one backed by a
powerful family, setting the law at open defiance.

English Law before Norman Conquest 221

But this was an extraordinary measure, analogous
to nothing in the regular modern process of law.

The details of Anglo-Saxon procedure and
judicial usage had become or were fast becoming
obsolete in the thirteenth century, which is as
much as to say that they were already outworn
when the definite growth of the Common Law
began. But the general features of the earlier
practice, and still more the ideas that underlay
them, have to be borne in mind. They left their
stamp on the course of our legal history in mani-
fold ways ; many things in the medieval law
cannot be understood without reference to them ;
and even in modern law their traces are often to
be found.

While the customary forms of judgment and
justice were such as we have said, there was a
comparatively large amount of legislation or at
least express declaration of law ; and, what is even
more remarkable, it was delivered in the mother
tongue of the people from the first. ^Ethelberht,
the converted king of Kent, was anxious to emulate
the civilisation of Rome in secular things also, and
reduced the customs of his kingdom, so far as
might be, to writing ; but they were called dooms,
not leges ; they were issued in English, and were
translated into Latin only after the lapse of some
centuries. Other Kentish princes, and afterwards
Ine of Wessex, followed the example ; but the

222 King Alfred

regular series of Anglo-Saxon laws begins towards
the end of the ninth century with Alfred's publica-
tion of his own dooms, and (it seems) an amended
version of Ine's, in which these are now preserved.
Through the century and a half between Alfred's
time and Cnut's x legislation was pretty continuous,
and it was always in English. The later restora-
tion of English to the statute roll after the medieval
reign of Latin and French was not the new thing
it seemed. It may be that the activity of the
Wessex princes in legislation was connected with
the conquest of the Western parts of England,
and the need of having fixed rules for the conduct
of affairs in the newly settled districts. No one
doubts that a considerable West-Welsh population
remained in this region, and it would have been
difficult to apply any local West-Saxon custom to
them.

Like all written laws, the Anglo-Saxon dooms
have to be interpreted in the light of their circum-
stances. Unluckily for modern students, the
matters of habit and custom which they naturally
take for granted are those of which we now have
least direct evidence. A large part of them is
filled by minute catalogues of the fines and com-

1 The so-called laws of Edward the Confessor, an antiquarian compilation
of the twelfth century largely mixed with invention, do not even profess to
be actual dooms of the Confessor, but the customs of his time collected by
order of William the Conqueror.

English Law before Norman Conquest 223

positions payable for manslaughter, wounding, and
other acts of violence. We may well suppose that
in matters of sums and number such provisions
often express an authoritative compromise between
the varying though not widely dissimilar usages of
local courts ; at all events we have an undoubted
example of a like process in the fixing of standard
measures after the Conquest ; and in some of the
later Anglo-Saxon laws we get a comparative
standard of Danish and English reckoning. Other-
wise we cannot certainly tell how much is declara-
tion of existing custom, or what we should now
call consolidation, and how much was new. We
know from Alfred's preamble to his laws, evidently
framed with special care, that he did innovate to
some extent, but, like a true father of English
statesmen, was anxious to innovate cautiously.
On the whole the Anglo-Saxon written laws,
though of priceless use to students of the times,
need a good deal of circumspection and careful
comparison of other authorities for using them
aright. It is altogether misleading to speak of
them as codes, or as if they were intended to be a
complete exposition of the customary law.

We pass on to the substance of Anglo-Saxon
law, so far as capable of being dealt with in a
summary view. There were sharp distinctions
between different conditions of persons, noble, free,
and slave. We may talk of " serfs " if we like,

224 King Alfred

but the Anglo-Saxon " theow " was much more
like a Roman slave than a medieval villein. Not
only slaves could be bought and sold, but there
was so much regular slave-trading that selling men
beyond seas had to be specially forbidden. Slaves
were more harshly punished than free men, and
must have been largely at their owner's mercy,
though there is reason to think that usage had a
more advanced standard of humanity than was
afforded by any positive rules. Manumission was
not uncommon, and was specially favoured by the
Church. The slave had opportunities (perhaps
first secured under Alfred) for acquiring means of
his own, and sometimes bought his freedom.

Among free men there were two kinds of
difference. A man might be a lord having
dependents, protecting them and in turn sup-
ported by them, and answerable in some measure
for their conduct ; or he might be a free man of
small estate dependent on a lord. In the tenth
century, if not before, every man who was not a
lord himself was bound to have a lord on pain of
being treated as unworthy of a free man's rights ;
" lordless man " was to Anglo-Saxon ears much
the same as " rogue and vagabond " to ours. This
wide-spread relation of lord and man was one of
the elements that in due time went to make up
feudalism. It was not necessarily associated with
any holding of land by the man from the lord, but

English Law before Norman Conquest 225

the association was doubtless already common a
long time before the Conquest, and there is every
reason to think that the legally uniform class of
dependent free men included many varieties of
wealth and prosperity. Many were probably no
worse off than substantial farmers, and many not
much better than slaves.

The other legal difference between free men
was their estimation for wergild, the " man's price "
which a man's kinsfolk were entitled to demand
from his slayer, and which sometimes he might
have to pay for his own offences; and this was
the more important because the weight of a man's
oath also varied with it. A thegn (which would
be more closely represented by " gentilhomme "
than by " nobleman ") had a wergild six times as
great as a ceorTs l or common man's, and his oath
counted for six common oaths before the court. 2
All free men, noble or simple, looked to their
kindred as their natural helpers and avengers ; and
one chief office of early criminal law was to
regulate the blood-feud until there was a power
strong enough to supersede it.

We collect from the general tenor of the Anglo-

1 The modern forms of these words, thane and churl, have passed through
so much change of meaning and application that they cannot be safely used
for historical purposes.

' 2 There were minor distinctions between ranks of free men which are now
obscure, and were probably no less obscure in the thirteenth century : they
seem to have been disregarded very soon after the Conquest.

15

226 King Alfred

Saxon laws that the evils most frequently calling
for remedy were manslaying, wounding, and cattle-
stealing ; it is obvious enough that the latter,
when followed by pursuit in hot blood, was a natural
and prolific source of the two former. The rules
dealing with such wrongs or crimes (for archaic
laws draw no firm line between public offence and
private injury) present a strange contrast of crude
ideas and minute specification, as it appears at first
sight. Both are however really due to similar
conditions. A society which is incapable of re-
fined conceptions, but is advanced enough to
require equal rules of some kind and to limit the
ordinary power of its rulers, is likewise incapable
of leaving any play for judicial discretion. Anglo-
Saxon courts had not the means of apportioning
punishment to guilt in the particular case, or assess-
ing compensation according to the actual damage,
any more than of deciding on the merits of con-
flicting claims according to the evidence. Thus
the only way remaining open was to fix an
equivalent in money or in kind for each par-
ticular injury : so much for life and so much
for every limb and member of the human body.
The same thing occurs with even greater pro-
fusion of detail in the other Germanic com-
pilations of the Dark Ages. In the latter days
of Anglo-Saxon monarchy treason was added to
the rude catalogue of crimes, under continental

English Law before Norman Conquest 227

influence ultimately derived from Roman Jaw ; but
the sin of plotting against the sovereign was the
more readily conceived as heinous above all others
by reason of the ancient Germanic principle of
faith between a lord and his men. This promi-
nence of the personal relation explains why down to
quite modern times the murder of a husband by
his wife, of a master by his servant, and of an ecclesi-
astical superior by a clerk, secular or regular, owing
him obedience, were specially classed as " petit
treason" and distinguished from murder in general. 1
Secret murder as opposed to open slaying was
treated with special severity. This throws no light
on our later criminal law ; nor has it much to do
with love of a fair fight, though this may have
strengthened the feeling ; rather it goes back to a
time when witchcraft, and poisoning as presumably
connected therewith, were believed to be unavoid-
able by ordinary caution, and regarded with a
supernatural horror which is still easy to observe
among barbarous people. With these exceptions,
and a few later ones of offences reserved for the
king's jurisdiction, crimes were not classified or
distinguished in Anglo-Saxon custom save by the
amount of public fine 2 and private composition

1 Blackstone, Com. iv. 203.

2 Wite was probably, in its origin, rather a fee to the court for arranging
the composition than a punishment. But it is treated as penal from the
earliest period of written laws. In the tenth century it could mean pain or
torment ; see C. D. 1222 ad Jin.

228 King Alfred

required to redeem the wrong-doer's life in each
case. Capital punishment and money payment,
or rather liability to the blood-feud redeemable by
money payment, and slavery for a thief who could
not make the proper fine, were the only means of
compulsion generally applicable, though false accusers
and some other infamous persons were liable to cor-
poral penalties. Imprisonment is not heard of as a
substantive punishment ; and it is needless to say
that nothing like a system of penal discipline was
known. We cannot doubt that a large number of
offences, even notorious ones, went unpunished.
The more skilled and subtle attacks on property,
such as forgery and allied kinds of fraud, did not
occur, not because men were more honest, but
because fraudulent documents could not be in-
vented or employed in a society which knew
nothing of credit and did not use writing for any
common business of life.

Far more significant for the future development
of English law are the beginnings of the King's
Peace. In later times this became a synonym for
public order maintained by the king's general
authority ; nowadays we do not easily conceive
how the peace which lawful men ought to keep
can be any other than the Queen's or the common-
wealth's. But the king's justice, as we have seen,
was at first not ordinary but exceptional, and his
power was called to aid only when other means

TLnglish Law before Norman Conquest 229

had failed. To be in the king's peace was to have
a special protection, a local or personal privilege.
Every free man was entitled to peace in his own
house, the sanctity of the homestead being one of
the most ancient and general principles of Teu-
tonic law. The worth set on a man's peace, like
that of his life, varied with his rank, and thus the
king's peace was higher than any other man's.
Fighting in the king's house was a capital offence
from an early time. Gradually the privileges of
the king's house were extended to the precincts of
his court, to the army, to the regular meetings of
the shire and hundred, and to the great roads.
Also the king might grant special personal pro-
tection to his officers and followers ; and these two
kinds of privilege spread until they coalesced and
covered the whole ground. The more serious
public offences were appropriated to the king's
jurisdiction ; the king's peace was used as a special
sanction for the settlement of blood-feuds, and was
proclaimed on various solemn occasions ; it seems
to have been specially prominent may we say as
a " frontier regulation " ? where English conquest
and settlement were recent. 1 In the generation
before the Conquest it was, to all appearance, ex-
tending fast. In this kind of development the first
stage is a really exceptional right ; the second is a
right which has to be distinctly claimed, but is open

1 See the customs of Chester, D. B. i. 262 b, extracted in Stubbs, Sel. Ch.

230 King Alfred

to all who will claim it in the proper form ; the
third is the " common right " which the courts will
take for granted. The Normans found the king's
peace nearing, if not touching, the second stage.

Except for a few peculiar provisions, there is
nothing in Anglo-Saxon customs resembling our
modern distinctions between wilful, negligent, and
purely accidental injuries. Private vengeance does
not stop to discriminate in such matters, and cus-
tomary law which started from making terms with
the avenger could not afford to take a more judicial
view. This old harshness of the Germanic rules
has left its traces in the Common Law down to
quite recent times. A special provision in Alfred's
laws recommends a man carrying a spear on his
shoulder to keep the point level with the butt ; if
another runs on the point so carried, only simple
compensation at most 1 will be payable. If the
point has been borne higher (so that it would
naturally come in a man's face), this carelessness
may put the party to his oath to avoid a fine. If
a dog worried or killed any one, the owner was
answerable in a scale of fines rising after the first
offence ; - the indulgence of the modern law which
requires knowledge of the dog's habits was un-
known. But it may be doubted whether these

1 ./Elf. 36. The statement is rather obscure. One is tempted to suppose
that an accident of that kind had happened to some well-known person at
the king's court.
23.

English Law before Norman Conquest 231

rules applied to anything short of serious injury.
Alfred's wise men show their practical sense by an
explanatory caution which they add : the owner
may not set up as an excuse that the dog forthwith
ran away and was lost. This might otherwise
have seemed an excellent defence according to the
archaic notion that the animal or instrument which
does damage carries the liability about with it, and
the owner may free himself by abandoning it (noxa
caput sequitur}?-

We have spoken of money payments for con-
venience ; but it does not seem likely that enough
money was available, as a rule, to pay the more
substantial wergilds and fines ; and it must once
have been the common practice for the pacified
avenger to accept cattle, arms, or valuable orna-
ments, at a price agreed between the parties or
settled by the court. The alternative of delivering
cattle is expressly mentioned in some of the earlier
laws.

As for the law of property, it was rudimentary,
and inextricably mixed up with precautions against
theft and charges of theft. A prudent buyer of
cattle had to secure himself against the possible
claim of some former owner who might allege that
the beasts had been stolen. The only way to do
this was to take every step in public and with good
witness. If he set out on a journey to a fair, he

1 See Holmes, The Common Law, 7-12.

232 King Alfred

would let his neighbours know it. When he did
business either far or near, he would buy only in
open market and before credible persons, and, if
the sale were at any distance from home, still more
if he had done some trade on the way without
having set out for the purpose, he would call the
good men of his own township to witness when he
came back driving his newly-gotten oxen, and not
till then would he turn them out on the common
pasture. These observances, probably approved
by long-standing custom, are prescribed in a whole
series of ordinances on pain of stringent forfeitures. 1
Even then a purchaser whose title was challenged
had to produce his seller, or, if he could not do
that, clear himself by oath. The seller might pro-
duce in turn the man from whom he had bought,
and he again might do the like ; but this process
(" vouching to warranty " in the language of later
medieval law) could not be carried more than three
steps back, to the " fourth hand " including the
buyer himself. All this has nothing to do with
the proof of the contract in case of a dispute be-
tween the original parties to the sale ; it is much
more aimed at collusion between them, in fact at
arrangements for the receipt and disposal of stolen
goods. The witnesses to the sale are there not for
the parties' sake, but as a check in the public
interest. We are tempted at first sight to think

1 See especially Edg. iv. 6-n.

English Law before Norman Conquest 233

of various modern enactments that require signa-
ture or other formalities as a condition of particular
kinds of contracts being enforceable ; but their
provisions belong to a wholly different category.

Another archaic source of anxiety is that
borrowed arms may be used in a fatal fight and
bring the lender into trouble. The early notion
would be that a weapon used for manslaying should
bring home the liability with it to the owner, quite
regardless of any fault ; which would afterwards
become a more or less rational presumption that
he lent it for no good purpose. Then the risk of
such weapons being forfeited continued even to
modern times. Hence the armourer who takes
a sword or spear to be repaired, and even a smith
who takes charge of tools, must warrant their
return free from blood-guiltiness, unless it has been
agreed to the contrary. 1 We also find, with re-
gard to the forfeiture of things which " move to
death," that even in case of pure accident, such as
a tree falling on a woodman, the kindred still have
their rights. They may take away the tree if they
will come for it within thirty days. 2

There was not any law of contract at all, as we
now understand it. The two principal kinds of
transaction requiring the exchange or acceptance
of promises to be performed in the future were
marriage and the payment of wergild. Apart from

1 JElf. 19. 2 ^Elf. 13.

234 King Alfred

the general sanctions of the Church, and the king's
special authority where his peace had been declared,
the only ways of adding any definite security to a
promise were oath and giving of pledges. One or
both of these were doubtless regularly used on
solemn occasions like the settlement of a blood-
feud ; and we may guess that the oath, which at
all events carried a spiritual sanction, was freely
resorted to for various purposes. But business had
hardly got beyond delivery against ready money
between parties both present, and there was not
much room for such confidence as that on which,
for example, the existence of modern banking
rests. How far the popular law took any notice
of petty trading disputes, such as there were, we
are not informed ; it seems likely that for the most
part they were left to be settled by special customs
of traders, and possibly by special local tribunals
in towns and markets. Merchants trafficking be-
yond seas, in any case, must have relied on the
customs of their trade and order rather than the
cumbrous formal justice of the time.

Anglo-Saxon landholding has been much dis-
cussed, but is still imperfectly understood, and our
knowledge of it, so far from throwing any light
on the later law, depends largely on what can be
inferred from Anglo-Norman sources. It is
certain that there were a considerable number of
independent free men holding land of various

English Law before Norman Conquest 235

amounts down to the time of the Conquest. In
the eastern counties some such holdings, un-
doubtedly free, were very small indeed. 1 But
many of the lesser free men were in practical sub-
jection to a lord who was entitled to receive dues
and services from them ; he got a share of their
labour in tilling his land, rents in money and kind,
and so forth. In short they were already in much
the same position as those who were called villeins
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Also
some poor free men seem to have hired themselves
out to work for others from an early time. 2 We
know next to nothing of the rules under which
free men, whether of greater or lesser substance,
held " folk-land," that is, estates governed by the
old customary law. Probably there was not much
buying and selling of such land. There is no
reason to suppose that alienation was easier than in
other archaic societies, and some local customs
found surviving long after the Conquest point to
the conclusion that often the consent of the village
as well as of the family was a necessary condition
of a sale. Indeed it is not certain that folk-land,
generally speaking, could be sold at all. There is
equally no reason to think that ordinary free land-
holders could dispose of their land by will, or
were in the habit of making wills for any purpose.

1 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 1 06.
2 M\f. 43.

236 King Alfred

Anglo-Saxon wills (or rather documents more
like a modern will than a modern deed) exist, but
they are the wills of great folk, such as were
accustomed to witness the king's charters, had
their own wills witnessed or confirmed by bishops
and kings, and held charters of their own ; and it
is by no means clear that the lands dealt with in
these wills were held as ordinary folk-land. In
some cases it looks as if a special licence or consent
had been required ; we also hear of persistent
attempts by the heirs to dispute even gifts to great
churches. 1

Soon after the conversion of the south of
England to Christianity, English kings began to
grant the lordship and revenues of lands, often of
extensive districts, to the Church, or more accu-
rately speaking to churches, by written charters
framed in imitation of continental models. Land
held under these grants by charter or " book,"
which in course of time acquired set forms and
characters peculiar to England, was called bookland,
and the king's bounty in this kind was in course of
time extended to his lay magnates. The same
extraordinary power of the king, exercised with the
witness and advice 2 of his Witan, which could con-
fer a title to princely revenues, could also confer

1 See C. D. 226 compared with 256.

2 A strictly accurate statement in few words is hardly possible. See the
section " Book-land and Folk-land " in Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond,
p. 244 sqq.

JLnglish Law before Norman Conquest 237

large disposing capacities unknown to the customary
law ; thus the fortunate holder of bookland might
be and often was entitled not only to make a grant
in his lifetime or to let it on such terms as he
chose, but also to leave it by will. My own
belief is that the land given by the Anglo-Saxon
wills which are preserved was almost always book-
land even when it is not so described. Indeed
these wills are rather in the nature of postponed
grants, as in Scotland a "trust disposition " had
to be till quite lately, than of a true last will and
testament as we now understand it. They certainly
had nothing to do with the Roman testament.

Long before the Conquest it had become the
ambition of every man of substance to hold book-
land, and we may well think that this was on the
way to become the normal form of land-ownership.
But this process, whatever its results might have
been, was broken off by the advent of Norman
lords and Norman clerks with their own different
set of ideas and forms.

The various customs of inheritance that are to
be found even to this day in English copyholds,
and to a limited extent in freehold land, and which
are certainly of great antiquity, bear sufficient
witness that at least as much variety was to be
found before the Conquest. Probably the least
usual of the typical customs was primogeniture ;
preference of the youngest son, ultimogeniture or

238 King Alfred

junior-right as recent authors have called it, the
" borough-English " of our post-Norman books,
was common in some parts ; preference of the
youngest daughter, in default of sons, or even of
the youngest among collateral heirs, was not un-
known. But the prevailing type was equal divi-
sion among sons, not among children including
daughters on an equal footing as modern systems
have it. Here again the effect of the Norman
Conquest was to arrest or divert the native lines of
growth. In this country we now live under laws
of succession derived in part from the military
needs of Western Europe in the early Middle
Ages, and in part from the cosmopolitan legislation
of Justinian, the line between the application of
the two systems being drawn in a manner which
is accounted for by the peculiar history of our
institutions and the relations between different
jurisdictions in England, but cannot be explained
on any rational principle. But the unlimited
freedom of disposal by will which we enjoy under
our modern law has reduced the anomalies of our
intestate succession to a matter of only occasional
inconvenience.

Small indeed, it is easy to perceive, is the portion
of Anglo-Saxon customs which can be said to have
survived in a recognisable form. This fact never-
theless remains compatible with a perfectly real and
living continuity of spirit in our legal institutions.

English Law before Norman Conquest 239

If we do not nowadays observe King Alfred's
dooms, or anything like them, still we owe it to
the work of Alfred and his children that England
was saved to become an individual nation, and that
our fundamental ideas of justice have survived all
external changes. Those ideas may be summed up
very shortly. Justice is essentially public ; the
business of parties is to conduct their cases accord-
ing to the rules of law, the business of the court
is to hear and determine between them, not to
conduct an inquiry ; judicial interpretation of the
law is the only authentic and binding interpretation,
and in particular the executive has no such power.
These principles appear obvious to most of us, but
there are many civilised countries where they are
not admitted. We can trace them back to the
rudest beginnings of our jurisprudence ; they are
as vigorous as ever, in all the complexity of modern
affairs, wherever the English tongue is spoken.

ALFRED AND THE ARTS

BY REV. W. J. LOFTIE

16

ALFRED AND THE ARTS

HE story of the life of King Alfred
connects his name with the practice
of three arts. He was an architect,
a writer, and a musician. We so often
hear of the art of war that when we remember his
proficiency as a soldier we are inclined to forget
that fortification, fighting, fishing, and hunting, if
they may be called arts, are not fine arts. Alfred's
noble defence of England against the Danes has
ever since his day been an example to his country-
men of later generations. He first taught them
the negative virtue that consists in not knowing
when they are beaten. But our concern, in the
particular chapter that has fallen to my lot, is with
Alfred and the fine arts : and as you cannot
enjoy painting or music without a house, it be-
hoves us to inquire first as to the state of archi-
tecture in the ninth century, and as to the part taken
by Alfred in building houses, churches, and cities.
We must remember that though, as we know,
writing and the illumination of manuscripts had

244 King Alfred

attained a very high pitch of excellence, Alfred had
no maps to guide him. His workmen may have
been able to scratch their diagrams on stones, and
in other similar ways to obtain guidance in carrying
out such buildings as the king required. But he
had traversed all that part of England over which
he reigned, and was as well acquainted with the
marshes of Somerset as with the wooded valley of
the Lea and the chalk cliffs of his southern shore.
He knew how to build and how to handle the
ships of his time, and was able to defeat the Danes
on what might be called their own element.
Tradition has always and plausibly assigned to him
a further feat of naval warfare. When his enemies
had sailed up to Hertford and prepared to rest for
the winter and mend their boats, he, so to speak,
drew the water from under them by the knowledge
which prompted him to divide the channels. The
object of this and other achievements of the kind
was his anxiety to obtain the command of the
great estuary into which the Fleet, the Wallbrook,
the Lea, and the creeks about Barking fell. To
gain this region was one thing, to hold it another.
The Saxons before his time disliked the use of
walls in warfare. Still more they disliked the
trouble of building and maintaining them. But
Alfred possessed whatever was known of fortification,
and by this knowledge he was able to raise the first
permanent impediment in the way of future invaders.

And the Arts 245

The best authorities agree that to Alfred rather
than to the Romans must be ascribed the founda-
tion of London as it was during the Middle Ages,
and as, in a sense, it is still. Stow, as far back as
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, citing some long-
lost document or tradition, tells us that Alfred
found London empty. He, to use a very modern
expression, " restored " the walls. He rebuilt-
them with the material at hand, namely, the
material with which another Saxon king had built
the church of St. Alban. The Saxons had dis-
dained to fight behind walls in their conquest of
the degenerate and Romanised Britons. But the
Danes were as fighting men equal to the Saxons.
Some advantage was needed before the Saxons
could overcome their formidable invaders. He
saw two important points to be gained by the
restoration of London : first, that his new city
would be virtually impregnable by the Danes ;
secondly, that the situation would be that from
which he could best defend the whole valley of
the Thames. As the Thames rises in Gloucester-
shire, and runs thence to Essex and Kent, this
was to defend all his English dominions. We say
now that to hold the Nile is to hold all Egypt and
much more. In those days, when the river was
the chief highway, to protect the Thames was to
protect Kent, Wessex, and Mercia. I have men-
tioned hunting as an art. Alfred had an eye for a

246 King Alfred

hunting country, as we say now. London was
seen by him as we see Pevensey, a ruined wall
enclosing nothing. There may have been vestiges
of a church. There may have been the piers of a
bridge. There can have been little else. Alfred
made the bridge into a fortress, renewing the great
timbers which had connected the piers. The
bridge stood a long way farther down the stream
than the modern London Bridge, and to defend it
the king built a tower at the south-east corner of
the restored wall. William the Conqueror, like
Alfred, saw the advantages of the site, and here he
placed the tower which still stands, a relic of his
reign, a reminiscence of that of his great predecessor.
The Roman roads through the city, and the gates
by which they made their exit, no longer existed,
or, at best, were ruined and useless. He made
one road diagonally from the bridge across his
market-place to Westgate, which we know as
Newgate. A second road led to what we still call
Bishopsgate, some distance westward from the site
of a Roman gate which opened on the old roads
to Lincoln and into Essex. His corn-market, where
there was a weighing-stone for wheat, stood to the
west of the Market Place or Cheap. A road along the
northern side of the Cheap was in existence so soon
after Alfred's time that it must have been planned
if it was not made by him. We call it Cheapside,
and here there are traditions of a king's palace

And the Arts 247

near the spot where, centuries later, the great
men of the city began to assemble in their
Guildhall.

We have mentioned Alfred's wall. His out-
line, we may be sure, was speedily filled up. St.
Paul's Church rose among the wooden and brick
houses. Civic institutions began to show them-
selves where there was security ; and Alfred's
brother-in-law, Burgred, the last King of Mercia,
had a house in Coleman Street, and gave the
cabbage garden to the Bishop of Worcester.
Alfred's daughter, ^thelflaed, married ^Ethelred,
Burgred's successor, who was called the Alderman
of the Mercians. To him, and after his death to
his widow, the king committed the charge and
governance of the city, and ^Ethelbert became the
first alderman of London. The importance of the
place is apparent. It was the easternmost bulwark
of Alfred's kingdom against the settled Danes of
East Anglia, as well as against the fresh incursions
of pirates and filibusters from over the sea. Alfred's
prescience is proved by one single fact. From
that day to this London has never been taken
by force of arms. The Danes from the North
Sea never got past the Tower the Danes from
the Danelaw never broke through the wall.

With regard to ecclesiastical architecture in
Alfred's time we know very little ; with regard to
civil architecture scarcely anything. The church

248 King Alfred

of St. Lawrence, Bradford-on-Avon, is assigned
by competent judges to as late a date as the ninth
century ; but Aldhelm, who was Bishop of Sherborn
near the beginning of the seventh century, founded
a nunnery at Bradford, which was afterwards
connected with that of Shaftesbury, and the
church is mentioned as early as the time of King
./Ethelred, just a hundred years after the death of
Alfred. Building-stone of the best kind abounds
in the neighbourhood, as well as in that of Deer-
hurst, near Tewkesbury. The stone masonry
suggests that wooden buildings set the pattern in
both places : while, from the ease with which St.
Paul's in London was burnt, both before and after
the Norman Conquest, we may be sure it contained
very little brickwork. Deerhurst was built in
1053, so we must not look to it as an example of
the architecture of Alfred's time. At Wing, near
Aylesbury, the chancel is Saxon, and not unlike St.
Lawrence's chapel in its peculiar flat panelling. It
is very lofty, but less narrow in proportion than
Bradford, and has a series of very interesting vaulted
crypts, in which we see a good many thin bricks of
the kind usually ascribed to the Romans, fragments
perhaps of a Roman fortress or a villa at that
place. Several towers with early Saxon features
remain, but many have lately been destroyed, as at
St. Albans, Limpsfield, and other places. A few
fragments of Beda's time may possibly remain

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

THE SEASONS OCTOBER TO DECEMBER

(Cot Ionian Library)

And the Arts 249

in the very ancient church of Jarrow. Saxon
building with Roman bricks is to be seen at St.
Martin's, Canterbury, and at Dover, but both
falsified by injudicious alterations. Where good
building-stone comes to the surface, as in Northamp-
tonshire, we find not far apart examples of churches
and towers which may well have existed at the
beginning of the tenth century. Barnack and Earls
Barton may be named, and with them should be
classed St. Michael's at Oxford, and St. Benedict's
at Cambridge. Traces of Saxon work are often
found in old churches, but they can seldom be
dated in the age of Alfred. It may, in fact, be
laid down as a rule that where there were no
fortifications, building was of but a temporary
character, and where stone did not greatly abound,
churches were made of wood and were very perish-
able. In a few places towers were built specially,
like the Irish round towers, for storage and
defence. In these cases we usually find great
height in proportion, and an arrangement of the
entrance so that it can only be reached by a ladder,
such as we may still trace in the Tower of London,
the keep of which had no entrance on the ground
level before the reign of Henry VIII. Of dwelling-
houses we see no examples. In London, as much
as two centuries later, ordinances were made for the
improvement of town dwellings, but that previously
this branch of architecture had been sadly neglected

250 King Alfred

we may infer from reading that even chimneys
were usually made of wood.

We know that castles were built by Alfred, and
in his time, but in a majority of cases they con-
sisted only of mounds and stockades, strengthened
by great beams and balks of timber. To with-
stand attacks like those of the Danes, sudden and
usually brief, these defences may have been very
powerful. At a few places like Tamworth, where
some supposed Saxon masonry is still pointed out,
or at Colchester, where, as at London, Roman walls
were restored, a little building took the place of
woodwork. Mr. Clark, the best authority about
Medieval Military Architecture^ says plainly that
though " the English were from a remote period
conversant with masonry, and constructed churches
of stone or timber as suited them best," they
avoided everything but timber where they made a
mound or an artificial earthwork of any kind. The
Norsemen from the mouth of the Elbe were not
very different from the Danes and the Saxons,
Jutes and Angles were only earlier immigrants
from the same regions. It is not possible now to
distinguish the earthworks thrown up by Alfred
and his men from those of the Danes which they
overthrew. One thing only we can recognise as
his peculiar work, namely, the formation in his
own mind of clearly devised plans by which, with
inferior strength, with fewer men and arms, and in

And the Arts 251

face of frequent disaster, he was able to consolidate
his power, to turn even defeat into success, and at
last, before his early death, both to obtain a time
of respite for his people and to show them how in
the future they might always hopefully resist the
invader. If the Danish attack was for the moment
overwhelming, it was desultory. The defence
offered by Alfred was far-seeing, part of a con-
sistent whole, a scheme which must eventually
prevail.

In 876 the pirates attacked Wareham success-
fully, and thence fell upon Exeter : but in 878
Alfred made his famous camp in the Somerset
marshes, and by slow degrees drove them north-
ward and eastward, established himself in London,
and fortified it, thence expelling them from
Gravesend, from Rochester, from Farnham, from
their great timber fort at Benfleet, until Hasting,
the Danish leader, in 893, submitted to Alfred and
was converted and baptized. Finally, in 897 the
war was over. The Danes had thrown up a
work " on the Lea, twenty miles from London,
whereupon JElfred," says Mr. Clark, " threw up
another work on each bank of that river lower
down, and diverted the waters through a number
of shallow courses, thus effectually shutting in the
Danish ships." From this time to the end of his
life, a brief period of about four years, Alfred
devoted himself to the arts of peace. Among

252 King Alfred

them he reckoned ship-building and the codifica-
tion of the laws, but we chiefly remember his love
of books, his establishment of schools, in which
writing was practised as a fine art, and his en-
couragement of skilful work in gold, enamel, and
inlay.

Many examples remain to show us that art of
this last kind, as well as poetry and music, were
largely and successfully practised among the Anglo-
Saxons. The great discoveries in grave mounds
in Kent, of which the results may be seen in the
Mayer Museum at Liverpool, prove that from
a very early period there were among the people
skilful designers and artificers, not only in jewellery,
but in glass. The well-known ornament preserved
at Oxford, probably a royal badge, which bears his
name, is perhaps the most familiar object which
can be connected with him. We may remember
of Alfred, as well as of King Edwin of North-
umbria and of other law-loving monarchs, that
he hung up gold bracelets by the wayside, and that
none dared to steal them. Unfortunately for
another story connecting Alfred with the fine arts,
it is not older than the twelfth century. The fact
that such a legend existed shows us what was the
popular estimate of the king's character. We are
glad therefore to observe that Freeman finds
nothing impossible in the story that " Alfred,
wishing to know what the Danes were about and

And the Arts 253

how strong they were, set out one day from Athel-
ney in the disguise of a minstrel or juggler, and
went into the Danish camp and stayed there several
days, amusing the Danes with his playing, till he
had seen all that he wanted, and then went
back without any one finding him out." Alfred's
dealings with the Danes, whether in disguise or
otherwise, led to the defeat and conversion of
Guthorm, to the peace of Wedmore, and to two
incidents in which pictorial art has a place : the
capture of the Raven standard, and the cutting of
one of the figures of a horse on the side of the
chalk downs. There are two such white horses,
one near Edington, which has been " restored," the
other near Shrivenham, "which has not been altered
at all, but is very old and rude, so that you might
hardly know that it was meant for a horse at all."

The pretty story of Alfred's youth, as to his
learning to read, will not, unfortunately, bear
critical examination. That it should have been
so long believed and so often told is, however,
eloquent as to the reputation he acquired as a boy.
Some have even doubted if he could read, but in
his journey to Rome he learned Latin at least it
is more probable that he knew Latin than that he
was ignorant of it. He was certainly desirous,
during his scanty leisure from warfare, to further
the cause of learning by all means in his power.
His monks at Athelney and his nuns at Shaftes-

254 King Alfred

bury were expressly devoted to the labours of the
scriptorium, and when we observe the number of
the books which, in spite of the Danes, were pro-
duced in England in the course of the eighth and
ninth centuries, we are forced to the conclusion
that the powers of the time were unanimously in
favour of the art of writing. We may, indeed, go
much further than this. After a careful comparison,
such as may be made in the British Museum, or
any other great public library, we are forced to the
conclusion that no country in Europe at that time
could boast of the production of such beautiful
books, filled with such skilful writing and illus-
trated with such exquisite pictures, as England in the
reign of King Alfred. A well-known manuscript
(Addl. MSS. 34, 890) produced by the monks of
Alfred's own monastery at Winchester, or the
volume of Gospels and other readings written
without illustrations at Canterbury, cannot be sur-
passed in all the qualities which we admire in
manuscripts. Italy itself could do nothing even
approaching the Psychomachia of Prudentius, prob-
ably written at Shaftesbury in the ninth century.
It is filled with figures representing the soul in
conflict with evil. They are wrongly described as
" tinted," but the figures and their draperies are
drawn in two colours, in outline, in a manner
which would not surprise us on a Greek vase of
the best period. We admire in a relief by Donatello,

And the Arts 255

or a fresco by Giotto, similar art, centuries later.
Of the same period, or earlier, is a book reciting
the names of the benefactors of Lindisfarne St.
Cuthbert was Alfred's special patron in which
the lettering is partly in black, partly in gold,
worthy of a Liber Vit<e. In many volumes we
see such an initial as that which figures in the
story mentioned above, among them copies of
Beowulf's or Caedmon's poems, such as might
very well answer to the book of old songs which
Alfred's mother was said to have shown him.
(Cottonian MSS. Vit. A. xv.)

The famous Eenedictional written for .ZEthel-
wold, Bishop of Winchester, some fifty years after
Alfred's time, may be taken to show us to what
perfection this art was brought. The style is that
to which the artists of his time were tending.
Here and there, among older books, we may trace
features which occur in this sumptuous volume,
both among the figure -subjects and among the
ornaments. Sir Digby Wyatt, an excellent judge,
is enthusiastic on the manuscript, yet fails to
appreciate the figure-subjects, because they show
" little classical influence." I am not inclined
to find fault on that account. The opinion of
a learned antiquary of the last generation, John
Gage, should have great weight. He looked upon
the Eenedictional as the culmination of the art of
the Anglo-Saxon school ; and John Young Ottley

256 King Alfred

expressed himself in equally eulogistic terms about
the manuscript, which is in the collection of the
Duke of Devonshire and which was fully described
and in great part engraved by the Society of Anti-
quaries in 1832 {Archteologia, vol. xxiv.) Ottley
points out its chief claim on our admiration thus :
" You desire from me a few words on the illumina-
tions in St. jEthelwold's Benedictionary, with my
opinion of their merits as works of art. I feel
honoured by the request, and comply with it the
more willingly as I can honestly say that I think
them in the highest degree creditable to the taste
and intelligence of this nation at a period when in
most parts of Europe the fine arts are commonly
believed to have been at a very low ebb." Farther
on, Ottley speaks of " the justness of the general
proportions of the figures." He especially praises
some little angels holding scrolls, which, he says,
" have so much gracefulness and animation, are so
beautifully draped, and so well adapted in their
attitudes to the spaces they occupy, that I hardly
know how to praise them sufficiently."

The mechanical part of the work should be
carefully examined. It shows and not it alone,
but many early books as well that in the time
of Alfred artists could command the help of
artificers who knew how to make vellum fit for the
most delicate painting and writing ; that colours
were produced worthy of the vellum for which they

And the Arts 257

were prepared ; that gold-beating and gilding with
the leaf had been carried to a perfection never since
surpassed. Godeman, the monk, afterwards, in
970, abbot of Thorney, who wrote the book, must
have been born during the reign of Alfred, or
soon after, and learned his art from the writers of
the great king who, in his English translation of
the Pastoral of Gregory, remarks feelingly on the
destruction wrought by the Danes, and how before
their incursions " the churches throughout Britain
were filled with treasures and books."

INDEX

/Estel, the, 192, 195
Africa, description of, 164
Alfred regains his kingdom, 17,
18

as lawgiver, 22-26

permanence of his work, 32

personal appearance of, 33

as king, 41

legendary and real, 42, 43

army, 45

accession to throne, 46, 133

visit to Rome, 58, 172

portrait of a king, 61, 62

writings of, 63, 64

life work, 66

mother of, 71

parentage, 71, 72

his youth, 76

as a musician, Si

his laborious life, 88-90

translations of books, 100-104

religious views, 107

will of, 1 10, 203

military tactics, 118

first campaign, 129

marriage, 129

campaigns against Hasting and
the " Great Army,'' 145-147

as a geographer, 151

selection of books for the people,
177-181

minor literary works, 199-202

as architect, writer, musician, 243
Anglo-Saxon dooms, 222

justice, 218

land-holding, 234-239

life, 209

women, 7, 8

Anglo-Saxons, gods of, 3-5

manners and customs of, 7-10
Ashdown, battle of, 1 1 8

Basing, battle of, 133

Bede, literary works of, 180

Bede's History, 198

Benedictional, 255

Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy,

30, 178, 183
extract from Sedgefield edition,

185, 186
Britons of Cornwall and Wales, 58,

59
Burhs, 142

Candle-clocks, invention of, 91
Canute on pilgrimages to Rome, 74
Capital punishment, 228
Castles built by Alfred, 250
Church, Alfred's relation to the, 63
City of God, Orosius's, 177
Code of Alfred, 174-176
Courts of bishops and great men, 212
Cura Pa star a Us, 179, 180
translation of, 187

Danes, Alfred's feelings towards, 83

baptism of, 85

first appearance of, 1 1

second invasion of, 55

wars of, 15
Danish Conquest, 15

invasion, 46-50
Dialogues of Gregory the Great, 180

Ealhswith, 129
Ecclesiastical Laws, 97-99

260

King Alfred

Eddington, battle of, n8
Edmund the Martyr, 130
Education of Alfred's children, 87,

88
of children, Alfred's views on,

1 88

Embassies to foreign parts, 95, 96
England in Alfred's time, map of, 2
Ethelred, death of, 133
EthelwulPs will, 73
Europe, summary of inhabitants, 154-

156

Final judgment in court, 220
Foreign discoveries, 59, 60
Fortification of towns, 141, 143

Gregory the Great, 179
Gregory's treatise, 105
Guthrum, King of Danes, 50
treaty with, 55

Haddeby, 160

Hierdeboc, 187-192

Hyde Abbey, Register of, no

Income, distribution of, 92
John the Scot, 108

Kingdom, settlement of, 54
King, portrait of, by Alfred, 61, 62
King's peace, 228
Kriegs Spiel, 16

Laws, code of, compiled, 53
Learning, encouragement of, 60,
61

introduced, 90
Letter to bishops, 189-192
Life work of Alfred, 66
Literature fostered by Alfred, 29
London fortified, 19, 20

restoration of, 57

Map of Alfred's England, 2
Manual, formation of Alfred's, 94
Military tactics of Alfred, 118

Monasteries, foundation of, 93, 94

rebuilt, 26, 27
Monument to Alfred, reasons for, 36

Naval forces, state of, 123-125
Navy, development of, 135, 140
foundation of, 52

Oath, in court of law, 214-217
Oht-here, voyage of, 157-160
Orosius, Paulus, 152, 177

Payments for convenience, 225, 231
Peace of 878, 139
Pilgrimages to Rome, 75
Property law, 231, 232

Religion of the tribes, 3-5
Religious bequests by Alfred, 112
Rome, Alfred's connection with, 28
communication with, 86

Slaves, freedom of, 113

of Anglo-Saxons, 223-225
St. Cuthbert, 1 5
St. Lawrence, Bradford -on -Avon,

248

State of English defences, 119-123
Stone masonry, 248

Thegnhood increased, 143, 144

Viking raids, 125-129, 135-139
Vikings, invasion of, 55
Voyages of Oht-here and Wulfstan,
157-160

Walls of London restored by Alfred,

245, 247

Wcrgild, payment of, 233
Will of Alfred, 1 10, 203

of Ethel wulf, 73
Witenagemot, 31, 32, 211
Women of Anglo-Saxons, 7, 8
Writings of Alfred, 63, 64
Wulfstan, voyage of, 160, 161

York, battle of, 128

Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.

BowKer, A.
Alfred the Great

DA

153

B77

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